Archive for September, 2010

Following on from my  previous post about Google instant, we now have news about Google suggest and the case that was brought against them with regard defamatory suggestions.

The case revolves around an individual who had been convicted on appeal of corruption of a minor, however the guy found that google was suggesting ‘plaintiff name rapist’ and ‘plaintiffs name satanist’ as suggestions.

The guy managed somehow to get some solicitor to act for him, and won his case. So where does this leave Google (who have said they will appeal)? Well if they lose their appeal it could throw a total spanner in the works of their predictive search, because that is based on the very same technology.  Then again, if they are displaying web pages rather than term suggestions would the court find against them?

One thing is certain here, well two things really.

1. The world of search is moving faster than the laws of the land

2. People will sue (and win) for anything.

Google Convicted of Defamation Original ruling (French)

So it is here at last (for some of us at least)! What am I talking about? Google instant of course.

For some time now, Google has been making search term suggestions, but in a massive step but only to those using certain browsers and in certain geographical locations, namely “US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, FireFox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8″ but it is also available elsewhere if users are signed into a Google account.

So what does google instant look like?

Well it looks a bit like that image to the left, well in fact it is exactly like that. Although I was using FireFox, I had to be signed into my google account to get instant results.

Many people have reported that this will cause difficulty to SEO’s but personally I don’t see how it can, because as I have stated many times, the King Queen & Holy Grail of internet marketing, and, all of these ‘suggestions’ by google should be on the radar of a decent SEO.

Where I DO see a potential issue though is with PPC, and I will explain my thinking here.

In the image left you can see a couple of google ads being displayed. I ran the same for SEO and there were a load, and as I continued to type, ads flashed up and went, now my concern here is will these ad showings be classed as impressions by Google? because if they are, then that has serious repercussions on the campaign conversion rate of display to click through, which in turn impacts on the cost and performance of the advert. Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago I made a post about crap Google results full of twitter and the like and good old Goog listened to me … Well me and most of their user base really, and moved away from it.

Well here we are with Google realtime, a real time search engine.

Not exactly todays news but newsworthy all the same

http://www.google.com/realtime