Mozilla, creators of popular internet browser Firefox, claim Microsoft is restricting user choice in Windows 8, by only supporting Internet Explorer.
In a potential online PR disaster for Microsoft, both Mozilla and Google have raised public concerns about the future of Windows operating systems.
Harvey Anderson, from Mozilla’s general counsel, claims Microsoft will return Windows 8 users to the “digital dark ages”, when only Internet Explorer was available to navigate the web.
Anderson says Microsoft is refusing to allow Firefox, Chrome, or indeed any other browser to work on its new operating system, which will be loaded on ARM processor chips.
Mozilla claims Microsoft is planning for its new Windows RT (Windows running on ARM) to run in two environments – a ‘Classic’ mode, and a ‘Metro’ mode which will run apps.
“However, Windows on ARM prohibits any browser except for Internet Explorer from running in the privileged ‘Windows Classic’ environment,” Anderson said. “In practice, this means that only Internet Explorer will be able to perform many of the advanced computing functions vital to modern browsers in terms of speed, stability, and security, to which users have grown accustomed.
“Given that IE can run in Windows on ARM, there is no technical reason to conclude other browsers can’t do the same.”
Anderson said the decision would restrict user choice whilst also killing competition and innovation.
“We encourage Microsoft to remain firm on its user choice principles. Excluding third-party browsers contradicts Microsoft’s own published Principles, that users and developers have relied upon for years,” he said.
Anderson’s comments may hit home hard with Microsoft, which has already faced antitrust action in the past. Back in 2001, DOJ vs Microsoft saw the firm forced to allow PC sellers to include non-Microsoft software on new computers. The European Commission was also involved, leading to Windows users being given a choice of browsers in Europe.
Google has backed Mozilla’s concerns. A spokesman told V3: “We share the concerns Mozilla has raised… we’ve always welcomed innovation in the browser space across all platforms, and strongly believe that having great competitors makes us all work harder.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Microsoft’s search offering, Bing, has undergone another revamp. And with a huge focus on social, Bing may have found a way to begin to oust Google from search dominance.
After joining a ‘search alliance’ with Yahoo!, the “New Bing” will try to usurp Google by offering things it currently can’t.
Of course, Bing will still return normal organic search results and paid ads, just like it used to.
But now its social annotations, scraped from public information across a variety of social networks, are being lumped into a special sidebar, giving you the chance to interact with social friends.
The sidebar will pull information from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare and even Google+.
Google has already fallen out with Twitter, and, to a lesser extent, with Facebook. It can’t return Twitter profiles in its search results, because the microblogging site has blocked their spiders.
Not so with Bing.
Whereas Google has faced accusations of throttling social results – leading Facebook and Twitter to publicly demand “Don’t be Evil” (a cheeky nod to Google’s original ethos) whilst falling out with the search giant – Bing isn’t discriminating.
Google isn’t going to be able to pull info from Twitter or public posts from Facebook until relations are mended. In the meantime, Bing has a big open deal which could allow it to steal a march on Google.
The ramifications of this social focus, on both search engine optimisation and pay per click campaigns, could be huge. It would see an integrated Internet marketing approach, where search marketing and advertising is combined with social media.
Friend recommendations could become key selling tools, for instance. Group discounts for social groups with similar interests could be offered. It’s still early days, but the potential to create more joined-up marketing campaigns certainly exists.
Bing has been quick to point out that in a blindfolded taste test – much like those undertaken during the 1980s cola wars between Coke and Pepsi – search users preferred Bing’s search results to Google’s.
“We regularly test unbranded results, removing any trace of Google and Bing branding,” they said. “When we did this study in January of last year, 34% preferred Bing, whilst 38% preferred Google.
“The same unbranded study now shows that Bing search results have a much wider lead over Google’s. When shown unbranded search results, 43% prefer Bing, whilst only 28% prefer Google results.”
Of course, internal market research is hard to qualify. And Bing still needs to convince people to leave the relative comfort zone of Google and try something new.
If that works, though, then Google could face a real fight to maintain its position.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
By Ali Harris, content manager, ClickThrough Marketing
I just did a search for “Internet marketing”, out of interest, mainly, and I was bit surprised by Google’s first page of results.
The Internet marketing industry is currently feeling the harsh end of Google’s brickbat – with the Penguin update playing havoc with rankings as the engine looks to end webspam and keyword stuffing.
Examples of bad results have come up on various forums – we wrote yesterday about searching “Paypal France”. That term returns a whole load of spammy results.
That, suffice to say, wasn’t Google’s intention with Penguin.
We wrote earlier about another mistaken side effect of the algorithm update: the potential for successful negative SEO campaigns.
But until there are proven examples of negative SEO bombing an otherwise entirely reputable website, it’s the organic results that matter.
And the organic results remain skewed. I just searched “Internet marketing” on organic Google, without logging in, but with local UK search on (not by region, just country).
Two of the top five organic results are spam. That’s almost 50% spam. A few weeks ago, the top results for Internet marketing were all SEO companies.
So in this case, Penguin has made Google 40% more rubbish than it was.
Try it yourself: you’ll find returns for a telecoms company which offers phone numbers and telephonic systems – but has absolutely no apparent content, services, or information about “internet marketing”, as well as a site pertaining to offer the ‘new rules’ of Internet marketing, but actually only featuring two measly pages of absolutely terribly written content, and a seeming focus on Forex.
I’ve had a look at the sites themselves and can’t really see why Google thinks they should return in the top five results for an “internet marketing” search.
Maybe the search engine is having a laugh at the SEO industry – who are making money off Google’s free product (search) when Google would far rather they used its paid-for products (paid search or pay per click).
Or maybe this is another example of the recent Penguin update getting things very wrong indeed.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Search engine optimisation remains one of the most effective forms of internet marketing.
All good internet marketing strategies should pay attention to organic search initiatives to ensure a steady flow of search traffic to a target site.
Whilst paid search is becoming more prevalent amongst both search engines and social media networks, organic queries remain the biggest source of traffic, according to stats from Search Engine Journal.
They’ve broken down some of the more surprising SEO stats to show just how important a good optimisation strategy can be: even if it doesn’t yield results immediately, a patient, strategic approach will eventually pay dividends.
The stats show that 70% of links clicked on by search users are organic, with 70% to 80% of users saying they never click on paid ads. 75% said they never scroll past the first page of results.
Companies who post regular blogs have, on average, 434% more indexed pages than those who do not – but only 81% of businesses consider their blogs to be an important asset.
Search remains the number one source of traffic for a website – it’s a better drive than social media by 300% according to a study by Outbrain.
More than 100 billion global searches occur every month, with Google owning 65-70% of the market share.
Mobile devices are becoming a popular choice for search, too: there were 97.3 million mobile internet users in 2011. This year, that number is expected to top 113.9m. Of those users, 72.8m will be “mobile shoppers” in 2012.
The figures speak for themselves: SEO remains an absolutely vital component of online marketing.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
When we search on the Internet these days, we expect to be given a list of potential sites which will hold the answers we seek, be that a product, a specific data set, an answer to a question and so on. It is then down to us to seek the answers or research further until we find them. However, Google appears to be about to up the ante and head more towards providing direct answers to questions rather than links to sites where that answer may reside.
Potentially, this is huge.
For Google, it may mean that anywhere between 10 and 20% of all search queries could be answered directly within Google search, rather than on third party websites that currently pop up in the organic search results. This could have a drastic effect on traffic to websites, especially those who have not looked beyond the search engines to create broad spectrum marketing campaigns. Having all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea, and this change at Google may well prove it to those who have pitched everything at SEO and little to nothing at social media, mobile, PPC, article marketing, forum marketing, etc etc.
Optimising (SEO) may need to change in order to be more than just keyword rich, but also to be ‘answer rich’ ie to provide the answers that Google offers to searchers. Therefore, within the copy and content of a site, it may be necessary for the SEO expert to try to envisage more clearly exactly what answers are likely to be sought, and hence, the question(s) that may be in the mind of the searcher when entering the query.
On the plus side, trusted sites which continually create unique, quality content should have an easier time of it than those sites which duplicate other sources. Relevancy, creating author tags, correct labelling of content (as is required for Google shopping for instance), strong reasons for a user to stay within a site rather than return to Google, regular competitive analysis, and a need to co-ordinate marketing strategies towards Google all look likely to be required to ensure at least a modicum of success with Google’s semantic search.
There are likely to be some downsides in this ambitious proposal. There have been plenty of occasions where the algorithms have thrown up what could be considered irrelevant results; be these the type of results that Panda was introduced to eliminate, or inappropriate adverts, and Google will need to stick to facts first and produce consistently accurate results in that sphere (as it does now for simple search queries such as measurement conversions) or it could come under fire for losing yet more relevancy.
If you thought that the search engines’ algorithms were hard enough to optimise for, wait until you are up against AI (artificial intelligence) deciding what should show in the SERPs! Especially if/when the semantic search moves beyond factual e.g when is the full moon in April 2012? to the opinionated: e.g “Is SEO necessary?”
The UK’s Internet marketing and search engine optimisation industry is now worth more than £500m, according to a report by Econsultancy.
The online marketers’ site released the SEO Agencies Buyer’s Guide on March 19, with figures showing an 18% leap in the SEO market in 2011.
Econsultancy says the year-end value of SEO in the UK was around £514m – up from £436m in 2010.
The 2012 SEO Agencies Buyer’s Guide breaks down the valuation: explaining it was calculated using payments to agencies, investment and specialist costs for PR or social media marketing campaigns.
“It’s great to see that natural search has developed into a half-billion pound industry in the UK,” said Jake Hird, senior research analyst for Econsultancy.
“This also demonstrates the shifting landscape of the SEO marketplace. Now, search practitioners have to deal with elements such as social, mobile and local search, as well as continuing to optimise for other types of content, such as videos and images.”
The Econsultancy report also drew a correlation between SEO activity and other kinds of online marketing: with SEO becoming intrinsically important for PR, social media, content marketing and on-page information.
The report also looks at trends, changes and predictions for SEO, such as the focus on Google+, mobile search and increasing integration of SEO with other marketing campaigns.
The guide is aimed at companies looking to hire an SEO agency, with a breakdown of the UK’s most successful online marketing firms, together with their costs, services and achievements.
The guide is available to buy through Econsultancy.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Search engine giant Google is set to tweak its algorithm to improve its semantic search results.
Google is hoping to make its results more informative and useful for mobile users, and those using voice recognition technology.
Amit Singhal, from Google, revealed that upcoming algorithm changes will focus on semantic search tweaks.
Industry experts have postulated that Google’s focus on semantic search ties to the launch of the Google Assistant – which will allow Android users to make voice-activated search queries, much like Apple’s Siri feature.
Google has already introduced some semantic results: if a user asks “How tall is the London Eye?” the top result answers the question with “Best guess for London Eye height is 135 metres” – using aggregated information from trusted sources like Wikipedia.
Type “weather”, and the first result will show the latest forecasts.
The move is particularly useful for mobile web users, as it provides instantaneous answers without the need to trawl through websites. For queries on-the-go, semantic makes the search process smoother and more refined. For voice queries, it ensures a useful result is returned.
Google has led the way for search algorithm – constantly tweaking its site to return more relevant, higher quality and specific results. Its search technology already knows to look for synonyms (motor and auto, for instance) – but semantic will take this a step further: by essentially guessing why the user has made a specific search query.
By analysing billions of daily searches, Google is building a “Knowledge Graph”: a database with some 200 million entries that will help to track how searchers use results data, so the results can be made more relevant.
Of course, it will be some time before the technology becomes smart enough to react to queries like a human might – but these changes will certainly make mobile internet navigation more simple.
By displaying direct answers internally, instead of returning external pages, Google is, however, essentially positioning itself as a one-stop Internet shop. Whereas users now will initially go to Google to find web pages to comb for further information, semantic results will, to some extent, negate the need to do this.
Internalising information to Google could have repercussions for search engine optimisation strategies. For precedent, Rupert Murdoch already signalled disdain with Google News search results returning “copyrighted” content from the Sun and the Times.
News Corp’s way of dealing with Google republishing stories in its News results was swift, and expensive: paywalls.
Some trusted information sites are unlikely to oppose to Google cutting out the middle man for organic queries. But this won’t be the case across the board. How those sites react to semantic search remains to be seen: as well as how Google manages this process.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
The ‘throttling’ of Facebook and Twitter results on Google – with evermore rare occurrences of either site popping up on the first page – has made social media marketing on either site somewhat isolated.
Of course, both Facebook and Twitter would love to be ranked more highly by Google: but it’s become a case of ‘tough luck’ for both sites since the search giant launched Google+.
Google are a savvy bunch: trying to launch a new social network whilst giving equal weight to your competitors – despite screams of antitrust breach – is not a good business practice.
As such – and you’ve probably noticed this – Google has made huge efforts to make Google+ profiles as visible as possible online. This includes great organic search rankings, as well as notable mentions in Google News searches where the author of an article has linked to their Google+ profile.
Combined with Google’s seemingly common preference to stick YouTube video results near the top of SERPs, it’s fast becoming obvious that pouring Internet marketing efforts into Google platforms has the potential to yield better results, especially if you’re able to cross-combine your campaign to maximise +1s, YouTube referrals, organic rankings, and content pointers for your freshly-written articles.
Facebook has launched an IPO which will trigger a wave of new money-making moves on the site: things which marketers previously enjoyed for free will dry up, meaning serious budgets will be needed to take advantage of the potential 800-million user reach of the site.
Google+, on the other hand, isn’t quite ‘there’ in the popularity stakes yet to monetise.
Get in fast before it does and there are some immediate benefits for your SEO. Here are two very simple benefits of setting up a Google+ account which will help support existing SEO campaigns.
Organic boosts:
Google+ pages rank really well – and with Facebook and Twitter failing to reach search agreements, Google+ profiles look set to remain the search result of choice on Google. Getting your personal profile sorted, and linked back to your company, allows you far greater visibility: producing regular industry-related content will set you apart from competitors and solidify you as an ‘expert’ in your field, without the need for huge swathes of keywords. Obviously, SEO remains very important, but Google+ provides a ready-made boost for your SEO campaign which shouldn’t be ignored.
Get recommended:
Whilst Facebook ‘likes’ flag up popular pages for Facebook users, Google’s +1 feature puts hearty recommendations all over Google’s portion of the web. Rather than relying on insular Facebook referrals by creating popular content, items on your Google+ account can be flagged up to every web user who utilises Google search. That’s nearly all of them, then.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a provider of SEO Services & Pay Per Click strategies.
As we have mentioned before, many people are incompetent at search, and the search engines and SEO experts (as well as hardware manufacturers) have not been slow in taking this into account.
In a video from the Google stable, we hear about how Google is taking into account the changes that are occurring in user behaviour and needs, as well as the interfaces being used to search for content and the content being created. Daniel Russell, who presents the video, has the rather marvellous job title of Uber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness.
It is interesting to see how search is changing, particularly with the influx of social media and the ever-increasing need for real time searches which bring up breaking news, for example.
It is worth watching the Google Maps example given from 9mins onwards. This example shows how Google has enriched the results during the period 2005 to 2012, by changing the underlying dataset from an outsourced dataset to Google’s own. Whilst many of us may not have noticed the sometimes subtle changes which each iteration has brought, it is difficult to miss the vast changes that a mere 5-6 years has had on our comprehension of what search is, and therefore how as search marketers we have reacted to those changes.
From ensuring that a client’s address was listed on Google Maps (and then Local before returning the name to Maps), through to ensuring that there were photos of the location or shop, to adding Products into what was Google Base and is now Google Shopping, to encouraging customers to review the products and services, and so on and on….. through to the latest development in search which is ensuring that as Google moves to integrate all products together, we are being actively encouraged to use the rel=author tag to have content by certain individuals showing up in search results.
In talking about social and how it will affect search in future, we find ourselves falling into the world of big data (which, in case, you have not heard yet, is one of the buzzwords of 2012). So, for instance, whilst you may think you understand all about social networks, try looking at stackoverflow.com which is a great example of a niche social network, where big data is created, along with answers to complex problems, simply by the members of a community of interest.
As Google gets a handle on more of this type of social activity, and therefore advances Google+ beyond being a Facebook repro, then we will see more and more results in the SERPS which reflect the social activity from authors within our immediate or extended circles. And especially from those who have been canny about including keywords when creating content, as well as using that rel=author tag!
One of the problems with the ever-increasing creation of content is that it is, of course, becoming ever harder to index this and provide the results in a meaningful way using algorithms. After all, the search algorithms do not know whether you are looking up “polar bear hide” for a research project, because you are shopping to make a furry belt, or you actually mean a hide as in somewhere to hide from polar bears.
The examples given include 48 hours of video uploaded to Youtube every minute, or the equivalent of the Library of Congress added in information each day to the Net – and the rate of acquisition of new content is accelerating, fast. This means that, theoretically at least, if you can craft the right search, the amount of time spent finding the data you require is decreasing, day on day, as companies such as Google do the hard work for us. BUT, many people, as we said at the outset, quite simply do not know how to search, and hence find the results they are seeking.
So, for those interested in search, the really interesting part is about critical thinking skills and educating users to develop these skills so that they can more accurately access the information they are searching for (24mins). Which, hopefully, is of course, your website!
How do we, as search marketers, solve the problem of directing the user to a specific client website via a photo of a particular meal that their colleague has recommended at the restaurant if the only info the user has is: “It was ‘beef and rice’”? And how do we convert that search into a booking and a satisfied customer who leaves a tip, a review on our site, checks in on Foursquare, leaves a comment on our blog, signs up to our newsletter and eats in the restaurant on the discount coupon they received as a loyal customer?
After all, isn’t that why we want them to find the website in the first place?!
Being able to take a photo of a real world object and then search for the answer to your query is undoubtedly a goal of all search engines, because it can be so difficult to phrase the question to find the right answer using only words. Adding images to the mix takes us into a whole new realm of optimisation for search marketers. Then there’s Siri and voice, sounds and music, videos….you get the drift? If you thought search engine marketing had got a whole lot more complex over the last few years, with client fees staying fairly static but the workload increasing exponentially……it’s about to get a lot, lot harder!
Where else do you see search changing over the coming years as users become prosumers, hardware becomes more affordable, the disconnecteds get connected, and the volume of information, particularly real time social data, continues to increase by the hour? Do you envisage your task as a search engine /internet marketer becoming harder or more easier as tools for automation become available? As a user, do you see it becoming simpler to find the results you seek or more complex? How can website owners ensure that their sites remain optimised for the correct keywords?
Google has unveiled a number of changes made to search, whilst also announcing that it will be creating a monthly post for its Inside Search blog – to sum up any changes to algorithms made during the month – according to an article published by Search Engine Watch.
Ten changes in total have been made; here is a short, summarised breakdown of the most important of these changes:
- “Related query results refinements”: This change will mean that searches in which synonyms and other related terms conflict, with other words in the query, will see some results excluded.
- “More comprehensive indexing”: Google has improved its ability to locate long-tail documents; this means that ensuring that long-tail optimisation is implemented vitally important.
- “Image result freshness”: Now means that Google is more capable of finding the latest images – which can be important for breaking news stories.
- “Fresher and more complete blog search results”: This change will make the content published on blogs more likely to appear on an SERP (search engine results page) – thanks to an improved indexing system.
With many in SEO reliant on knowing the latest changes to search algorithms, Google’s move to sum up any alterations on a monthly basis – on the Inside Search blog – could prove to be extremely useful.
