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Restaurant Search on Google G1 by BoohRah

October 23, 2008 By Leave a Comment

BoohRah, the directory/search engine for restaurants has launched a restaurant search application on the new Google G1 phone. Below are some of the features added to the restaurant search app:

Viewable Map Area Search – You can zoom-in/zoom-out or drag the map to any area of the search and just hit the “Refresh” button and see top restaurants within that area. You can then filter the restaurants by using the search option to filter by cuisine, menu item, name or any other keyword.

Comprehensive Search – You can use the search option to find restaurants by city, zip, neighborhood, point of interest, street/cross street and your current location.

List View – The list view is a convenient way to browse all the restaurants quickly to see their cuisine, ratings, reviews and other relevant information. You can easily tab navigate back and forth between the map and list views.

Detail View - Each restaurant is rated for food, service, ambiance. We also show a brief summary of the reviews and a list of top sentiments extracted from those reviews. From this view, you can:

  • Call the restaurant directly
  • Get a street view of that restaurant to see the surroundings and neighborhood.
  • Write a review of the restaurant



    Restaurant Search App on T-Mobile G1 from Shrisha Radhakrishna on Vimeo.

Filed Under: Universal Search

Images and Video, The Lost Strategies

January 28, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Image optimization and video optimization are not secondary organic strategies anymore, they are essential in creating a well-rounded online presence. There are numerous resources you can turn to help perfect your strategy but I wanted to take a look at some techniques you may never thought of as well as some additional questions to ask yourself before applying any tactics.
  • Leveraging high image rankings: You may have top rankings for your images in both the image results and universal/blended results but what are visitors doing when they arrive at your site? Search Engines such as Google show the exact page where an image resides (after clicking throuh on an image) therefore this is a great opportunity to funnel visitors deeper to your site. The different images queries which refer visitors to your site can help dictate the type of content you should surround your images with.
  • Should you freshen up your images? You definitely should. Similar to textual content, keep visitors coming back with images that continue to match the visitor’s query (and intent). The most important point is to maintain the names of the images as well as the textual content within the alt attribute.
  • The ROI on Video: Video is an excellent way to promote your brand and services to visitors but how do you know when a given video has maxed out its potential. I recommend checking out trends for views, comments and clickthroughs (and again what visitors are doing after the click through). These trends should help show whether or not the video is still engaging visitors. If you are seeing the trends flat-line you know it’s time to add some new content.
  • Visitors know what they like to watch: If you’re thinking about enhancing your video strategy with some fresh content then I suggest you look to your visitors for help. Look at the comments they leave (if you’ve uploaded YouTube or MetaCafe) and secondly look at your internal search terms. Both of these areas are ways visitors have engaged with your content by providing feed back so why not show visitors what they want?

Bonus Tip*


This next strategy is not directly related to video or images but the concept is something you maybe able to apply elsewhere. I have two travel sites: BC Travel Guide (.ca) and British Columbia Tours (.com) and I am looking to rank highly for “Kelowna” or “Kelowna British Columbia.” So I created a Kelowna themed page on each site, both with keyword rich content, interlinking and images. The results are too early to tell but this allows me to test the level of authority per domain, the return per domain and the potential for having 2 sites rank highly for a few phrases.

Filed Under: Image Optimization, Universal Search, Video Optimization

Ultimate Video Optimization Resources

October 3, 2007 By Leave a Comment

Last week we gathered some useful link for Optimizing Images for Search Engines and this week we discovered some great resources for Optimizing Video for Search Engines. With Google introducing Universal Search earlier this year (and other engines closely following behind), search results are more and more likely to have video results integrated within natural search listings. Titles, Descriptions, Ratings, Average watch duration and Views are all factors contributing to the likelihood of videos (from YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, Yahoo Video) found within search results.Video now simply has to be a part of your digital marketing strategy

Check out the sites below for detailed tactics on how to leverage videos in your online campaign:

 

Top 10 Video Competitors – From Compete.com

Have a resource that should be added? Leave a comment and I will review it

Filed Under: Universal Search, Video Optimization

Image Search Optimization

September 28, 2007 By 1 Comment

If you want some basic tips on how to drive more traffic by leveraging images you may want to check out Pat Doyle’s post titled: “Get More Traffic By Using Images.” Pat’s tips include:

  • Use Descriptive Files Names for Images
  • Use the alt tag attributes
  • Use captions and descriptive text near images
  • Design unique images to differentiate yourself

Later in her post Pat also provides good examples on how to make images load faster as well as improve the style of your images with CSS.

Below are some other useful resources for optimizing images for search engines:

Image File ManagementKeep graphics and pictures in an ‘Image’ folder on your server in an organized manner, rather than hosted online. This will guarantee that they are always available for display (although the best of us suffer ‘technical difficulty’ at some stage or another!) and keep your image source code clean. If they are hosted by an online image gallery or sharing site then make sure it is reputable, and won’t randomly go offline or have difficulties. – I Need Hits

Have a resource that should be added? Leave a comment and I will review it

Filed Under: Image Optimization, Universal Search

Guide To Googles Universal Search

July 5, 2007 By Leave a Comment

It’s been over a month since Google announced Universal Search at Searchology and there has been many useful posts/articles surrounding thoughts on Universal Search and how to leverage Universal Search. Here are some useful resources for more information on Google’s Universal Search:

Filed Under: Google, Universal Search

Universal Search: Winners and Losers

June 12, 2007 By Leave a Comment

The ineedhits Blog reports that Google Maps has been the biggest winner in terms of traffic increases from the latest integration of Universal Search. Google maps has seen a 20.34% increase in traffic, whereas Google Book Search was the biggest loser – decreasing 19.44%. YouTube increased 8.26% and both Google Image Search and Google News decreased more than 7%.


Data from HitWise

Filed Under: Google, Universal Search

Top Universal Search Influencers

June 11, 2007 By Leave a Comment

To recap, Universal Search is a term coined by Google in which results from different vertical search engines (images, video, news etc…) are integrated into Google’s regular search results.

But when will these different search results show up? For example, what causes a video of a presentation by Steve Jobs to appear within the organic search results for the query: “Steve Jobs” Obviously it has to do with Google’s sophisticated algorithms which can correlate the right content to a user’s query, however here are some factors that I think can help influence the Universal Search results:

  1. Number of Searches per Individual Search Silo – This theory is based on shear volume for a given query on a given vertical search engine. For instance if the query “scenic mountains” has a high number of searches within the image search, perhaps this influences the top images to appear within Universal search for the same query.
  2. Performance through ratings and views – This applies mostly to Video Search because on YouTube and Google Video both ratings and the number of views are kept track of. Could the ratings/views affect the appearance of videos with Universal Search?
  3. Clicks per listing - Google applies this same type of algorithm on both AdWords and organic search results therefore it’s something that can help Google gauge the relevance of non-text based results.
  4. Time Spent - With the Google Toolbar installed on so many users’ computers as well Google Analytics installed on so many websites, Google can start to understand how engaged users are with a website (after a user clicked on a listing) by measuring time spent.
  5. Return Visits - If a user clicks on a result listing, visits a website/image/news listing, returns immediately and clicks on another listing and continues this cycle, will Google start decreasing the quality of the websites/image/news listings that were selected?
  6. Usability - While at Searchology I found out that Google performs rigorous usability testing using eye tracking to further understand users’ search behavior and reactions to different types of search results.

Google and ASK.com are both heavily involved with perfecting Universal Search and as search marketers it will be important for us to help our clients create relevant content which is not necessarily just text anymore. Go here: for strategies for Universal Search

Filed Under: ASK, Google, Universal Search