Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World

Long article about the pluses and minuses of Google+ integration with search.

Some highlights for me:

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Now: Personal, Private, Public & Social United

With Search Plus Your World, by default, there’s a new “Personal Results” view that appears. The view personalizes the listings you get based on both your own behavior and social connections, similar to what previously happened. In addition, content that’s been shared with you through the Google+ social network now also appears.

“The social search algorithm, and the personal search algorithm, and the personalized search algorithm are actually one algorithm now, and we are merging it in a way that is very pleasant and useful,” said Amit Singhal, who oversees Google’s ranking algorithms, when I talked with him about the new features.

You’ll know that personalized results are appearing when you see one or both of the indicators below:

The arrow on the left points to a message that, in this example, says that there are “50 personal results and 419,000 other results” that have been found. Some of those 50 results will be blended into the first page of results being shown.

The second arrow highlights a new toggle that Google has introduced, something that many of those who do search engine optimization have wanted for ages. It allows you to switch between personalized and unpersonalized results.

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No Content From Facebook Or Others, But Google Open To This

I’ve no doubt many people will find it useful to do one search to locate both private and public information at once. However, one of the biggest depositories of private information these days — if not the biggest — is Facebook.

Search Plus Your World doesn’t cover content on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Flickr. Or any social network or place where content might be shared to a more limited audience. Currently, “Search Plus Your World” would be better described as “Search Plus Google+”

Why are these others missing?

“Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service,” Singhal told me. “Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

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Secure Search Protects Privacy; Referrers For Advertisers Does Not

Google’s been focused on a bigger concern. Mixing private content in with its search results means that anyone searching without a secure connection potentially exposes that private content to eavesdropping.

And now the full story about why Google rolled out secure search for signed-in users back in October can finally be told. It was necessary preparation to allow for Search Plus Your World to happen today.

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Personalized Is The New “Normal”

Of course, it’s a mistake to assume that doing this really shows normal results. It will eliminate personalization factors such as your web browsing history (if you provide that to Google through its toolbar in Internet Explorer), your searching history or your social connections.

But geographic targeting — which can be really significant – will still happen. So will targeting by language. Google has begun calling these contextual signals rather than personal ones. Both can be overridden, for those who want. But doing so will still produce results that are still tailored, just to a different geographical location or language.

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Google Profiles Get Big Push

Another big change as part of today’s release is how people with Google+ accounts are going to be much more heavily highlighted in Google search.

For those logged in, they’ll begin seeing their friends appear right within the search box, like this:

You can see how for Ben Smith, a little picture of him appears next to the search suggestion for his name, which in turn is a link to his Google+ profile, if it were selected.

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WordPress Sites That Get Results - Designed by The BlogKing™, Michael Klusek

Following up on my earlier post about on-page optimization Rand Fiskin from SEOMoz recently made a WhiteBoard Friday video on applying some advanced techniques to on-page optimization.

Enjoy. There is a full transcript here.

WordPress Sites That Get Results - Designed by The BlogKing™, Michael Klusek

I never have enough time to write out a super-long, super inspiring end of year post. Hey, I’m writing books, not blogs these days. (Yes, I know I’m writing a blog now, you know what I meant.)

But… I do have a short list of things to tell you before 2011 ends.

If you want to be successful in 2012… you must:

1. Trust your gut
2. Stay on course
3. Get past the hard part
4. Stop pitying yourself
5. Stop envying other’s success
6. Ship a ton of products/services/content
7. Do your own thing
8. Work on things that are fun
9. Read a lot of books
10. Decide on your life”style” plan before you decide on your business

Happy new year. Now get to work!

(Via The Daily Flip, Jim Kukral – Marketing Ideas Online.)

Numbers 4 + 5 is a biggie. You(me) have to start where you are and be OK with that.

WordPress Sites That Get Results - Designed by The BlogKing™, Michael Klusek

This is available as a plugin to self hosted WordPress. Works great. A must have.

WordPress Sites That Get Results - Designed by The BlogKing™, Michael Klusek

Every minute, according to this chart, there are 695,000 status updates on Facebook. 695,000!

That’s a big number.

But it’s the same as the number of searches that are conducted online every minute. And Google makes a lot more money per search than Facebook makes per status update.

And as for email…

In the same 60 seconds in which 695,000 Facebook status updates are posted, 168 million emails are sent.

That’s 240 times as many.

There’s presumably a lot of SPAM in that email number.

But it seems safe to say the death of email is not exactly imminent.

WordPress Sites That Get Results - Designed by The BlogKing™, Michael Klusek

As if there weren’t enough reasons to not do business with GoDaddy, they recently made it clear that they not only support SOPA, but that they were involved in the authoring of the bill.

Polis pointed out that SOPA and Smith’s amendment already excluded certain operators of sub-domains, such as GoDaddy.com, from being subject to shutdowns under SOPA.

Even with that lesser-publicized fact aside, GoDaddy’s support of SOPA has spurred a large boycott, which they have met with a cavalier attitude (“we have not seen any impact to our business”) and some fuzzy PR-speak leading people to believe that they no longer support the bill, while they still do.

If you are looking to leave GoDaddy, or someone you know is, there are plenty of alternatives.

Domains: Name.com, Moniker, Gandi.net, Hover (Tucows), 1and1

<<Godaddy is not to be trusted. They are part of the pernicious 1% that believe in profit at all costs, the hell with YOUR liberty as long as GoDaddy maximizes return. Also as long as THEY get excepted from the law.

Read these book published by Harvard Business School for some alternative thinking on business orientation.>>

Betterness: Economics for Humans

(Via Webmaster-Source.)

WordPress Sites That Get Results - Designed by The BlogKing™, Michael Klusek

I recently saw a photography podcast that used Google+ ‘s HANGOUT feature. It was very cool with experts from different counties adding their perpectives on the topic at hand, this night it was about the merits and demerits of a new camera category by Nikon. Hangout With Trey Ratcliff really showcased how neat a video hang out can be. Got me inspired to resuscitate by photo blog at digital photo mastery.

That said this video by Google featuring Hangout put me over the top. If it is cool enough for Kermit and the gang to sing Pressure by Queen and David Bowie, its cool enough for me. Saw Bowie live in his Ziggy Stardust days, so lets just say I am still a fan.

David Bowie (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

WordPress Sites That Get Results - Designed by The BlogKing™, Michael Klusek

Starting Thursday, Twitter began rolling out their latest redesign, dubbed “New New Twitter” by users. The new design looks okay, albeit a bit heavy on the boxes, but some of the changes it brings aren’t so welcome. It seems to me as if Twitter is slowly strangling the brilliant simplicity that made it unique and successful, and making the service more and more like Facebook.

The first change that irks me is the new Connect screen, which replaces the Mentions tab. Instead of getting a listing of replies or tweets mentioning your username, you get something closer to a Facebook feed. The stream is cluttered with messages along the lines of “Mr. Follower and 6 others are now following you. Isn’t that great?” Oh, and anytime someone retweets one of your updates, it goes in there too. You can still get to the Mentions timeline, but it requires a second click. I imagine it’s even more “useful” if you have a half million followers.

I’m still not sure where they buried the Direct Messages page. I know it must be around here somewhere…

Next on the list is “Brand Pages.” Now the Twitter profiles for large brands get a few extra features that, while I’m sure they find useful, kind of detract from the Twitter experience and remind me of Myspace. (Remember them?)

Brand pages get to have a graphical banner on their profile, right above the timeline. They also get to make a featured tweet “sticky” and pin it to the top of their timeline. Oh, and did I mention any linked photos or videos in those sticky tweets get auto-expanded?

Now for the icing on the cake. Remember Loren Brichter’s excellent iOS app? Formerly known as Tweetie, it won an Apple design award before Twitter bought it and made it the official app. Well, Twitter has completely scrapped that codebase and replaced it with something that reminds me of Facebook’s kludgy app. It’s missing many of the great features of the old app, and feels very watered down in comparison. But it looks and acts more or less the same on Android, which is…good for Android users, I guess.

Gruber nailed it in his review.

…today’s new Twitter, is something else. It’s an attempt at a best way to do Twitter that is as consistent as possible across multiple platforms, ranging from the iPhone to Android to the mobile and desktop web. I don’t want an iPhone app that’s constrained by the restrictions of a mobile web app. The whole reason I prefer native apps is that I like experiences that far exceed what can be done in a web app. This is a native app that looks and feels like it was designed and polished according to the norms of web apps, not other native iPhone apps.

<<TweetDeck is drinking from the same well as Twitter on this. Web app ≠ native app and never will. Its one thing to offer an option but to force existing app users to suffer with a app/web bastard is guaranteed to tick your users off. I guess Wall Street thinking has taken over at both places.  Well that just confirms I am sticking with HootSuite. Both the iPhone app and web version(running in Safari) are stellar.>>

(Via Webmaster-Source.)

WordPress Sites That Get Results - Designed by The BlogKing™, Michael Klusek

You may remember the uproar from last fall, when SEOMoz purported there was a higher correlation between LDA scores and high rankings than any other factor. Some took this to mean that on-page optimization didn’t matter. It’s a topic that still pops up now and again; my on-page optimization isn’t working, I don’t know if it’s worth it… on-page optimization must be dead.

Not so, says Conductor. In their research study The Long Tail of Search, Conductor examined the effects of on-page auditing and optimization for long-tail keywords, versus optimizing for head terms or failing to optimize on-page at all. Not surprisingly, they saw a downward movement of more than two positions for keywords with no on-page optimization.

More at SearchEngineWatch.

Related articles

• The Ultimate Guide for Mastering Long Tail Search (hubspot.com)
• Five Effective SEO Strategies to Optimize Your Business Blog (entrepreneur.com)
• Advanced On-Page Optimization – Whiteboard Friday (seomoz.org)

WordPress Sites That Get Results - Designed by The BlogKing™, Michael Klusek

Of course I will be waiting a month or so to install. There are always patches later. And of course all the plugins I used need to updated or at least verified to work with this version.

WPCandy has a good summary of new features

Lot of UI tweaks in the Administrator area,  NO major new functionality that I can tell for the produced site.

Now, as of 3.3, there is no performance hit for using the post name permalink structure. It’s so solid, in fact, that post name permalinks are now one of the recommended structures in the permalink settings screen.

That’s good because I always set up url as post name only. That is what Google will extract info from, not the date. This makes it a bit easier and if is faster to display page thats a win.

Widgets get a bit brighter in 3.3. Now switching from a theme doesn’t mean your widget layout is lost forever. If you decide to switch back to that theme your widgets will return to their old position, saving you the time of reconstructing your old setup.

Every major release of WordPress is named after a jazz musician. It’s one of those things that keeps the project fun and human, I think. This release the titular artist is Sonny Stitt, an American saxophonist who passed away in 1982. If you’d like to get to know Sonny better, here is  a Spotify playlist by WPCandy with lots of his music on it.

This is the best Spotify playlist. Go check it out if you like jazz.

WordPress Sites That Get Results - Designed by The BlogKing™, Michael Klusek