Google Buzz..what do they think.

Due to several personal as well as professional reasons I couldn't make a single post about Google Buzz, which is creating a lot of hullabaloo. Many have been expressing their concerns about the privacy parameters, while at the same time may have stated their optimism regarding this new concept.

Google airs its first television ad

The speculations came true eventually, when Google aired its first major television ad last Sunday during Super Bowl. Google finally decided to take control of the ground they might have lost due to a delayed start.



Google has also made a blog post regarding the event saying,

“If you watched the Super Bowl this evening you'll have seen a video from Google called "Parisian Love". In fact you might have watched it before, because it's been on YouTube for over three months. We didn't set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search. Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it's had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience.”

Yahoo BOSS is not going to die a premature death

Yahoo BOSS is not going to die a premature death as was being speculated by the developers’ network. It, at least for the time being, is going to continue. After staying in the basement for several months, Yahoo BOSS is finally opening up to the third party developers, who were almost starting to give up hope on this strong search platform. Though it is still unknown that how much affected or influenced it will after Bing’s invasion, it can be assumed that Yahoo definitely has some plans for this wonderful platform. So either it can get amalgamated with Microsoft’s development foray or can stand strong in spite of MSN’s intrusion, weathering the storm. This was made clear by Yahoo, when their spokesperson Ashim Chhabra left a post on the BOSS group forum explaining the reason behind their meteor like disappearance. Here is the forum post by Ashim Chhabra that was posted in Technocrunch.

Folks,
Thank you for your feedback. We understand your frustration. This process has been long for all of us due to the complex nature of our agreement with Microsoft, and we appreciate your patience.
Under this agreement, Yahoo! is permitted to continue offering the BOSS web service, with search results that would integrate Yahoo! services and content with algorithmic results provided by Microsoft. As always, our intention is to provide a BOSS offering as long as it makes business and economic sense to do so. We are still examining what the BOSS offering will consist of, with some services powered by Microsoft, unique content that Yahoo! currently provides, and the potential for additional Yahoo! content in the future.
Prior to the announcement of the Yahoo!-Microsoft search agreement, we’d already shared our intention to explore a fee-based structure for BOSS. We continue to explore an appropriate fee structure or other revenue model as we work through the future of BOSS.
As you know, we must receive regulatory clearance before actual implementation of the search deal with Microsoft can occur. Only then can we finalize the future shape of BOSS. Of course, we will provide additional clarity and certainty when we can.

Thanks for your attention!

Yahoo! BOSS team

WSJ is beaten hands down by Google News!

When Mr. Ruperd Murdoch is busy complaining and drawing legal strategies against Google, a data generated from comscore comparison has popped up that is definitely going to give Mr. Murdoch a fresh new point to look at the ‘News’ issue (if he is not painstakingly prejudiced).
According to a recent survey it is revealed that, more people trust Google News over any other dedicated news brands, when it comes to getting news online. The closest competitor being New York Times, who has been outnumbered by an astonishing margin of 34million unique visitors. According to the survey Google had attracted almost 100 million unique visitors November,2009, with compare to 66millions by NYT. And if you are thinking where the hell is Mr. Murdoch, he is right at the bottom layer fetching just about 6 million unique visitors last month. Someone please go and tell the gentleman that it is just not the way to go about things!
You simply can not afford to be a hard nut, when it comes to compete with a brand as innovative and as trustworthy as Google! This striking data has not only given WSJ a lot of stuff to think, but also raised a serious question over the acceptability of the News Brands.
At this point you must be thinking that Google is doing just a great job!
You are right Google indeed is doing a great job, but there is another player who’s doing greater job in this field. Guess who?
It’s Yahoo!!!
The survey has revealed that almost 138 million (WOW!!) unique visitors had knocked Yahoo News, when it came to getting the news. Now that was some finding!
You just cannot write Yahoo off.
Following is the Comscore’s unique visitor’s graph(as posted in tech crunch);












Google's Real Time Search - Its Real Now!

It was new, it was happening, it was futuristic and above all it was related to “Search”. So how could Google stay away from it? It’s just little over six months since Larry Page had announced that they ‘have to do it’, and they have done it. It just proves their commitment and why they are the leaders. Of course they are not the first bring it, Bing has already been providing real time updates from twitters and all, but Google’s ‘RTS’ feature makes more sense to me. Let me tell you why;
 To avail Bing’s real time search you have to go to a dedicated page. That’s a complete repeller for me. We simply don’t have enough time to access different pages for regular results and real time search results. That’s where Google scores higher. Their feature makes more sense to me. You only get to see it ‘if’ there is any interesting updates available in the web, otherwise you will never get stuffed with crappy and unnecessary updates. And above all you will not have to go to another page to get them.
 Another overhead of Bing’s RTS is I think the retweet option. These tweets never get updated, so whats the point in retweeting? Google’s newest offering is atleast clean from such overheads.
But till now Google has covered very specific and little space for updated news. So you get to see real time search results for very few and selective keywords. But I guess that’s going to change, as its understandable that it’s still in an experimental phase, and they are definitely going to improve it.
But we go by the words of Amit Singhal, Google’s Ranking System’s head; Google will stay away from providing unwanted and unnecessary updates so that it never becomes annoying. Singhal added that Google RTS covers updates from the following domains,
• Tweets from twitter
• Google Blog Search contents
• Jaiku updates
• Identi.ca updates
• TwitArmy updates
• Google News updates
• Updates about newly created WebPages
And we think, this list is just going to get longer.

Pull Up Your Socks to Optimize Your Site's SPEED to Rank Well

Last Monday in a remarkable presentation at Pubcon, Matt Cutts has revealed that there is a strong possibility that Google might start considering loading speed of a site while ranking it. He said that the this parameter is under the review for quite some time now and lately it has caught a strong wind behind it through several lobbies within Google.
He said that Google's aim has always been to provide it's users with fast and most relevant search results. And with perception like that how could they overlook the speed factor. After all there's no use having a SERP full of relevant results that take ages to load. That's definitely not where the future of search lies. Specially when real time search is gaining more and more wind, this discrepancy is annoying not only from users point of view but also from that of Google's.
There's already around 200 parameters that Google consider in their algo, it could very well be an addition to the list shortly.
Though it might not be the most important factor, but still it could very well be decisive in its own term. So I think the time is not very far when webmaster's will start optimizing the speed for their sites.


To know more on this topic, see the webpronews video below that features the Matt Cutts interview.

Is News Corp Really a Crusador for Modern Day Journalism

When the several news agencies under the self proclaimed leadership of News Corp raised their voice against Google's authority to publish their news without their consent, I really gave it a thought that 'is Google really going a bit too far to please it's users?'
I thoroughly analysed their claims and their accusations. In spite of being a great fan of Google, I kept myself neutral to avoid even the single pixel of biasedness.
Their main allegation against Google was that they are providing their users first click info about a news, which is simply unacceptable. And I agreed with them in that point. But when I looked in to the matter with a slight seriousness, it sounded to be honest ridiculous to me, Why so?
Well how much info Google is providing in the first click?
The answer is, it's only the amount that you are providing them to publish. And you have full capability to control this amount. A person with the modest knowledge on web technology can put a limit on this.
And in an age, when a 10 year old kid knows how to protect his data using password, it sounds really nonsense that a big media house like News Corp are incognizant about that.
So if they want only their paid users to view the news, they can easily design their site in a way that SERPs will only show the news titles, and whenever a viewer wants to get in to it, it will ask for user name and password. And if the user is registered, then only he/she can read the news. It's as simple as that! So why they are making such a big noise out of it ?
Are they trying to use this issue to clear up their own guilts?
Specially if we think of News Corp, they have had a long tradition of plagiarism. And when 'they' speak against it in a way, it really sounds fishy.
I have no personal grudge against News Corp and all, but all these just seems to be too easy a problem to make a noise for.
And if you are thinking that why should news media make that extra technical effort to ensure their privacy, I think its too little a compromise compare to what they are going to get for it.

Google Introduces "One Box" Music Search feature

Google now has gone one up over yahoo in the domain of music search with their newly announced “One Box” venture. It also marks the beginning of a new journey by Google in an arena once overlooked by them. And here they have done almost a catching up job by embedding this new music search feature. But as they say, its always better late than never! Though Google was lethargic to react, still when they came up, they came up with a feature that is much superior to the one already in motion by yahoo. While Yahoo’s music search only returns live playable music results for the artists name only, Google’s will return results for album and songs name also along with the traditional artist name results.

Turning down the speculations thrown out by the media that this music search results will come up with links to purchase the songs, Google’s RJ Pittman said that, they have no intention to give a commercial touch to this search feature, at least at this point of time. But going by the past records, one can easily assume that this option is always on the cards. Any ways, who cares, at least I’d care the least even if they had embedded it with commerciality.

Google has tied up with online music majors like, Lala, iLike, Pandora and Myspace for this venture. And depending upon the availability, viewers will be able to listen to the songs live, provided by these content partners.

Real-Time Search is Not Far from Reality Now

If the current development tracks are maintained, we are not really far from celebrating the true advent of the 'Real time Search Experience'. In a win win deal proceeding Microsoft defeated Google by roping in Twitter in a dramatic table turn. Just when it seemed that the Search Emperor was going to get hold of the most promising and talented kid in the block, Microsoft flown in to the picture and snatched the prey to sport the last laugh.
And just to make the dish sweeter, Facebook also joined in the flock.
Now that's definitely one deal Google didn't want to see kissing success. Well, not much really revealed at this stage, but still it seems that the impregnated deal will soon give birth to the wonder baby who can completely change the face of the Search World in coming future. With millions of users tweeting about almost every thing under the sky, its definitely the future of searching. And the company from facebook is definitely going to make the road smoother.

Google Drops Page Rank from Webmaster Tools

After seeing that all their suggestions regarding the ineffectiveness of page ranks in deciding a page’s true quality falling in the deaf ears, Google finally decides to drop the page rank statistics from Google Webmaster Tools. Google has been saying discouraging things regarding page rank’s authenticity for long now. But it seemed like a rather contradictory policy on their side as they kept providing page rank statistics in their Webmaster Tools. So finally Google has sealed their thoughts on page ranks with this move, that got reflected in their recently released Webmaster Tools Lab.

The obsession over the little green bar among the webmasters community was like insane. Though many of them admit that it has very little significance while judging a page’s quality, still they simply couldn’t stop themselves from giving a glare at the little green devil. Many a time I wondered how on the Earth Google could give a vulgarly high pr to some pages that simply looked like craps!

It was Susan Moskwa from Google Webmaster Central team who came out explaining the exclusion as a reminder from their end to the webmasters community about their dangerous liaison with the green bar.

Google Chrome OS..the Raw Version got Leaked

At last we got to take a peek at the first glance of Google Chrome OS, and that too strangely enough came not from the Google’s end. And although it has come with loads of bugs and

problems in it, still it has already succeeded to generate enough curiosity among enthusiasts. You can now easily download the raw or unstable version as it is named. Google is definitely not happy about this. And they have already started an internal investigation to find out the source of this leak. I’ve here also posted some screen shots that were originally posted by Jonathan Frederickson of Techcrunch, who was actually the first person to find this out.



Ask Launches "Deals" to Survive the Search Engine War

To 'Deal' with the competition thrown by the heavy weights like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, Ask has introduced a new service or feature, 'Ask Deal'. It is almost in the same line as 'yahoo Deal'. Using its decent enough search technology Ask promises to churn out more than 1 million discount deals available in the web that covers offers from both the national and local merchants.

In its press release(as published in the searchengineland) Ask has said,

" Ask Deals, its proprietary database of more than 1 million high-quality savings offers from national and local merchants across hundreds of product categories.

Ask Deals scours the Web for all the deals available online – from savings on ‘skinny jeans’ to restaurant coupons – and organizes the best money-saving offers front and center on the results page, eliminating the need for consumers to search multiple sites or multiple coupon sites or search engine links to find their answer. The Ask Deals database is continuously refreshed and editorially refined, giving consumers the most up-to-date and highest-quality savings offers every time they search on Ask."

With its wide range of merchandise covering and looking at the approaching festive season, it seems that Ask has struck the right chord at the right time.
Being a relatively unexplored territory, 'discount deal' search has given Ask, the required breathing space. And being early in the competition will definitely enrich them with great advantage.

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