Google just launched a new feature on the mobile version of Google Product Search which could take local shopping search startup Milo out at the knees. Whenever you do a Google product search from a mobile phone, blue dots will appear next to items which are in-stock at nearby stores. The image at right is from a search I just did for “HDTVs.” The blue dots are subtle, but they certainly distinguish those results. Google has partnerships with Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and West Elm to show local inventory, and it is inviting other merchants to apply to participate as well.
Highlighting local inventory in product search results is exactly what Milo does, although it works on the Web as well as mobile. Milo will have to try to keep one step ahead of Google now that its business has been targeted as a feature of Google Product search.
As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.
But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.
Editor’s note: In the following guest post, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website.
If you have Google Apps running on your domain, now you can install third-party apps that fully integrate with Google’s apps.
Google has debuted the Google Apps Marketplace, an online store where Google Apps users can browse different cloud-based applications and add the ones they like to their suite of online tools. The apps can share [...]
Earlier today, Google chief economist Hal Varian gave a presentation to an FTC workshop on the changing economics of the newspaper industry. We all know that newspaper ad revenues have been falling off a cliff for years. Many media companies blame Google and are trying to put the genie back in the bottle with partial metered models for online news.
Google is understandably on the defensive, trotting out Varian to paint an unemotional picture with as much data as he can muster. But the picture he paints is a dour one for print media. For instance, the chart above shows the decline of overall newspaper ad revenues. Newspapers have taken huge hits in classifieds advertising (in blue) and national brand advertising (in red). The online portion (green) is still too small to make much of a difference.
We’re giving away a pair of passes to Google I/O today.
A little over a week ago, we kicked off our contest, encouraging you to send us any HTML5 web apps or Google Chrome browser extensions you’ve built. Alternatively, we asked you to tell us how you’d describe a web app to your grandmother. We got [...]
Tonight is the 82nd annual Academy Awards. Some people watch the show for the movies. Some watch it for the glamor. And some, watch it to gamble. And Google is making that easier than ever.
While the show is almost always way too long, one way to get into it is to have an Oscar pool, where everyone picks who they think will win in each category. Google has set up a special Google Docs template that allows you to easily create this pool and send it to all your friends. It’s so simple, that you can even set it up to be filled out right within an email.
Earlier this week, we reported on a number of new security enhancements that we expect Gmail to launch in the next few days, including oAuth support. It looks like we were right: a small startup called Etacts, which launched last month, has just implemented oAuth for Gmail IMAP accounts, allowing Etacts to securely tap into your email without the security risks associated with handing over your Gmail password. This appears to be the first public implementation of Gmail IMAP oAuth support. For email services, this is a big deal. We expect Google to announce support for the new feature more broadly this week.
So why does this matter? Etacts is a powerful tool for making sure you keep in touch with the friends, family, and business associates that are important to you. But at launch, it came with one significant flaw: it required users to hand over their Gmail account passwords (without them, the service wouldn’t be able to automatically pull in your new email). Even though Etacts seems trustworthy, handing over a password carries risks — if the service was ever hacked, there’s a small chance your password could have been compromised. With oAuth, this isn’t an issue.
Google will acquire Docverse, a service that lets users collaborate around Microsoft Office documents, we wrote last December. Today that deal has closed and will be announced by the companies. They are not disclosing the acquisition price, but our source last year said it would be in the $25 million range.
Docverse lets users collaborate directly on Microsoft Office documents. The company was founded by Microsoft veterans Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui. Shia drove product strategy for SharePoint and SQL Server, $1.6B and $3.0B products, respectiveley. DeNui ran Microsoft SQL Server’s web strategy.
With DocVerse Google will have a direct software connection to Microsoft Office, allowing users to collaborate real time on documents. Microsoft is also moving in this direction with Office 10. In effect, Microsoft is countering Google Docs with the new Office. And Google is countering that move with the acquisition of DocVerse. For more on this fight, see Imitation Isn’t Always Flattery: Microsoft Previews Google Apps Killer To Beta Testers.
It was only December when Google officially launched extensions for its Chrome browser. Almost immediately, there were 500 extensions in the gallery as many developers had been working on them for a while. Today, Google is saying that number is now past 3,000. And that’s significant because it’s already pretty close to the browser known for its extensions (which it calls “add-ons”), Firefox.
The exact number of add-ons for Firefox is a bit unclear. If you go by the category counts on the add-on site, there are 11,623. But it’s hard to know for sure if there is any overlap between the categories (I couldn’t find any, but I’m not sure there isn’t). More significantly, if you go by Mozilla’s statistic site where they tout their numbers, they claim to only have around 6,000 add-ons. To quote them, “Over 6,000 free, community contributed Add-ons for Firefox – more than for any other browser“. And in case you think this data is out of date, notes other 2010 milestones, such as the launch of Firefox 3.6.
In December 2008, Microsoft surprised a lot of people by releasing an iPhone app — Seadragon Mobile. A month later, they ensured the move wasn’t taken as a joke or gimmick by launching another app, Tag, into Apple’s App Store. Now, they have a few, including an app for Bing. And starting today, they’re doing the same for Android.
Tag for Android is the first Microsoft-made app launched on the mobile platform. This is notable, of course, because Android is the mobile platform by Microsoft’s chief rival: Google. Still, as we saw with the iPhone, Microsoft has no problems getting its technology out there, even if it means using rival platforms. Aside from Android and iPhone, Tag also currently works on Windows Mobile, J2ME, Blackberry and Symbian S60 phones.