Google Acquisitions 2001-2010
| Manoj Jasra - Thursday, August 26, 2010 0 Comments |
Scores.org has put together an excellent infographic which details all of Google's acquisitions since 2001. From Picasa to Keyhole to MeasureMap to YouTube to Aardvark - they're all there. To say Google's has been busy is an understatement.
Labels: Google
Facebook Flops; Google Drops
| ForeSee Results - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 0 Comments |
So you may have seen by now that the big ACSI (hashtag #ACSI) report on e-business was released today with a bang.
On any given year, there is big news in one of the measured categories, but this year, we have big news in all three!
- Social Media: This is the first year the ACSI has measured social media sites, and the results are surprisingly terrible. With an average score of 70, social media has the lowest industry aggregate score of any of online industries measured by the ACSI. Wikipedia leads the social media industry with a score of 77, and YouTube comes in at 73. Industry darling Facebook registers a score of 64, only one point above MySpace (63). Facebook and MySpace have scores so low, the only other companies measured by the ACSI with such low scores are airlines and cable companies.
- News and Information Sites: The big news in this industry is the debut of FoxNews.com at the top of the heap with a score of 82, which is five points above nearest competitor USAToday.com (77) and well ahead of other cable news providers MSNBC (74) and CNN.com (73). NYTimes comes in at 76. FoxNews registers the highest score ever received by any news organization in the ACSI. If I were Fox, I’d be using this in my media kit, because high satisfaction leads to high return visits and loyalty, which means more eyeballs for ads on FoxNews.com.
- Portals and Search Engines: Customer satisfaction with portals and search engines dives 7% to 77 this year and is driven largely by a 7% decline for Google (down six points to 80). Bing was measured for the first time this year, and it makes a strong first showing with a score of 77, second only to Google. What do you think, can Bing actually compete with Google?
You can download the free report here: http://www.foreseeresults.com/research-white-papers/ACSI-e-business-report-2010.shtml or catch me on Twitter (@larryfreed) with any questions about the findings.

Labels: Facebook, Google, voice of customer
Google Drops 1.1% June 2010 - comScore Search Market Share
| Manoj Jasra - Wednesday, July 14, 2010 0 Comments |
| comScore Core Search Report* June 2010 vs. May 2010 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch | |||
| Core Search Entity | Share of Searches (%) | ||
| May-10 | Jun-10 | Point Change Jun-10 vs. May-10 | |
| Total Core Search | 100.0% | 100.0% | N/A |
| Google Sites | 63.7% | 62.6% | -1.1 |
| Yahoo! Sites | 18.3% | 18.9% | 0.6 |
| Microsoft Sites | 12.1% | 12.7% | 0.6 |
| Ask Network | 3.6% | 3.6% | 0.0 |
| AOL LLC Network | 2.3% | 2.2% | -0.1 |
Facebook Climbing Around the World
| Manoj Jasra - Monday, June 28, 2010 0 Comments |

Labels: Facebook, Google, Twitter
Interview of Google's Maile Ohye - SES Toronto Preview
| Manoj Jasra - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 0 Comments |
[Manoj]: Can you talk a little bit about the benefits of the latest features, such as DNS record update and clicks/avg. position?
[Maile Ohye]: Sure, Manoj, thanks for asking. The schedule for our Webmaster Tools team includes a new release about every two months. Exciting! For site owners, this means new features for you every few months for the past 4+ years.
In each release, you’ve probably noticed that we aim to improve an existing feature (or our backend infrastructure), as well as release an entirely new feature. With DNS verification we helped webmasters more easily verify ownership of subdomains in Webmaster Tools. Rather than individually verify www.example.com, blog.example.com, and shopping.example.com, you can add one line to you DNS record and all associated sites/subdomains are verified at once.
We expect this feature to be most helpful to webmasters of larger sites.
In our improved Search queries feature, we aimed to help all site owners with access to impression and click data. Regardless of whether you’re a webmaster of a large ecommerce site, a cooking blogger, a large AdWords customer, or you’ve never heard of AdWords, every verified site owner has the capability to see data about their current potential visitors (impressions) and their actual visitors (clickthrough).
In terms of how to act on this data, one method is to find the queries where you’re receiving impressions but not getting clickthrough. Run those queries yourself from a searchbox and investigate why you’re not receiving visitors. How does your title and snippet look? Can you make your content more competitive?
With Search queries, you can view data from not just web search, but also from other properties like images, mobile, and smartphone queries. And you can tailor the information to originate from various countries, like the United Kingdom or Japan.
Features like Search queries' average position were developed to provide you a quick-glance understanding of the performance of a given keyword. Additionally, if you only want to quickly track a certain set of keywords, go ahead and “star” them for a more simplified display (like you’d see in gmail).
[Manoj]: How has real time search been incorporated?
[Maile Ohye]: Real Time results are triggered in Universal Search from the following:
- Threshold queries based on volume and delta: This includes triggering queries like [Lost] to show Real Time results on premier/finale night. We algorithmically notice a large delta for this query compared to perhaps yesterday, or earlier in the week. When [lost] reaches a certain threshold, we understand that Real Time results may be most relevant for the user.
- Common queries for Real Time results: This includes political queries and the like -- things that are constantly talked about and where freshness and/or a variety of sources may be helpful to the user.
Real Time information on Google is even better searchable. For certain queries, you can actually replay the conversation about a topic. I think this may be the only searchable, replay-able, public archive of tweets.
[Manoj]: What feature of Webmaster tools is your favorite?
[Maile Ohye]: Picking a favorite feature is pretty difficult for me. It’s like picking my favorite niece (I love them all!). One feature I definitely feel goes under-recognized, though, is HTML suggestions. HTML suggestions tells you what pages have duplicate HTML titles and meta descriptions (which are often used in your snippet).
This is actionable data. In getting a handle on whether your site has duplicate content, I'd first run a few site: queries, like [site:googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com microformats], to see if Google had serve-time filtered duplicate results. Next, I'd go straight to HTML suggestions. Pages with duplicate titles and snippets are likely complete duplicate content.
At SES New York a few months ago, I gave a more in-depth presentation on duplicate content, multiple sites, and how to address the issues. I'll try to film that presentation in mid-June (when I'm back from the SES Toronto keynote), and I'll write a related post on our Webmaster Central Blog just in case people find the information useful.
[Manoj]: For a brand new site, would a site owner see quicker indexation of their site with an XML sitemap vs. without?
[Maile Ohye]: An XML Sitemap is a great way to maximize your site's exposure to our crawlers. Once crawled, your site can be indexed. Once indexed, your site can be returned to users in search results. So yes, submit a Sitemap if you can.
Furthermore, when you submit a Sitemap, Webmaster Tools then displays the number of URLs from your Sitemap that are indexed. Win-win.
[Manoj]: What types of improvements are you guys hard at work at?
[Maile Ohye]: As for improvements, Webmaster Tools Message Center is only going to get better. If you're a verified site owner, I'd recommend setting up email forwarding of our messages. We currently notify site owners of certain violations of our webmaster guidelines, or when we crawl infinite spaces, or information about malware on their site.
Having a communication channel between us at Google and the opted-in, verified owner of a site has truly huge potential. Excitement mounts... music quickens... stay tuned!
Labels: Google, Search Engine Strategies
Conan O'Brien Visits Google
| Manoj Jasra - Monday, May 10, 2010 0 Comments |
Google at 71% for April, Bing/Yahoo/ASK Down
| Manoj Jasra - Thursday, May 06, 2010 0 Comments |
Percentage of U.S. searches among leading search engine provider | |||
| Domain | March 2010 | April 2010 | Month-over-month percentage change |
| www.google.com | 69.97% | 71.40% | 2% |
| search.yahoo.com | 15.04% | 14.96% | -1% |
| www.bing.com* | 9.62% | 9.43% | -2% |
| www.ask.com | 3.44% | 2.18% | -37% |
| Note: Data is based on four-week rolling periods (ending March 27, 2010, and May 1, 2010) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Figures are for Web searches only. | |||
| *This includes executed searches on Bing.com but does not include searches on Club.Live.com. | |||
| Source: Experian Hitwise | |||
Google Acquires BumpTop, 3D Multi-Touch Desktop Software
| Manoj Jasra - Monday, May 03, 2010 0 Comments |
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"Facebook" Most Searched for Keyword in March
| Manoj Jasra - Thursday, April 29, 2010 0 Comments |
Yahoo! related terms accounted for six spots while MySpace terms accounted for four searches across the search engines. Other search terms that were among the top 10 searches for all three search engines include youtube, facebook login, craigslist and yahoo mail.
| Top Search Terms for the 4 Weeks ending March 27, 2010 | ||
Rank | Search Terms | Google.com |
1 | 1.17% | |
2 | youtube | 0.66% |
3 | facebook login | 0.58% |
4 | craigslist | 0.54% |
5 | myspace | 0.51% |
6 | yahoo mail | 0.50% |
7 | yahoo | 0.30% |
8 | ebay | 0.23% |
9 | yahoo.com | 0.19% |
10 | gmail | 0.18% |
| Source: Experian Hitwise | ||
Labels: Facebook, Google, HitWise
Getting Around Google Penalties
| Manoj Jasra - Monday, April 26, 2010 0 Comments |
Labels: Google
6 Tools for Page Load Testing - New Google Ranking Factor
| Manoj Jasra - Monday, April 12, 2010 0 Comments |
- Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
- YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
- WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
- In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about site performance.
- Pingdom Tools: Every test also shows general statistics about the loaded page such as the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.
- Webpage Analyzer: Their script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component
Labels: Google
Visitors from Facebook More Engaged than Google?
| Manoj Jasra - Monday, March 22, 2010 0 Comments |
In particular, among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook.com users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google News
- Hitwise data indicate that visitors from Facebook are more loyal to News and Media websites than are visitors from Google News. In particular, among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google News. The figures are almost identical for Broadcast Media, with a 77% returning rate for Facebook compared to 64% for Google News.
- Among this sample of News and Media websites, Facebook users are more likely to be repeat visitors than those coming from Google News or the average for the site.
- To offer one example, 81% of visits to CNN.com in the week to March 6, 2010 were returning visitors while 84% of visitors to CNN.com that came from Facebook were returning visitors and 72% from Google News were returning visitors.
Labels: Facebook, Google, HitWise
Google Apps MarketPlace for Businesses
| Manoj Jasra - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 0 Comments |
Once installed to a company's domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity. Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps. With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each. The Google Apps Marketplace eliminates the worry about software updates, keeping track of different passwords and manual syncing and sharing of data, thereby increasing business productivity and lessening frustrations for users and IT administrators alike.
Labels: Google
50% of Google's Products Came from 20% Time (and other Facts & Figures)
| Manoj Jasra - Monday, March 08, 2010 0 Comments |
Here are a few highlights from the graphic below:
- Google gave 1.8 million shares to Stanford University for the exclusive license of PageRank
- 620 Million Visitors go to Google.com Daily
- 50% of Google's products originated from "20% Time"
- 270,000 words written per minute on Blogger
- There are 146 Million Gmail Users

Labels: Google
Google's Real-Time Search Factors
| Manoj Jasra - Wednesday, March 03, 2010 0 Comments |
Google's Real-time results include:
- Twitter
- MySpace
- Google Buzz
- News sites
Ranking Factors for Google's Real-time Algorithm
- Author quality
- Probability of relevance
- Semantics
- Real-time URL resolution
- Query hotness
- Query volume fluctuation
- Topicality
What webmasters should know: Pay attention to the mechanics of SEO but don’t overdo it.
DoubleClick for Publishers by Google
| Manoj Jasra - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 0 Comments |
For the past few years, we've been investing in a suite of solutions — AdSense, ad-serving technology and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange — to help online publishers make the most money possible from their content, whether they sell advertising directly through their own sales force, through an ad network such as AdSense, or a combination of both.
- A new interface that has been completely redesigned to save time and reduce errors.
Far more detailed reporting and forecasting data to help publishers understand where their revenue is coming from and what ads are most valuable. - Sophisticated algorithms that automatically improve ad performance and delivery.
- A new, open, public API which enables publishers to build and integrate their own apps with DFP, or integrate apps created for DFP by a growing third-party developer community (apps under development today include sales, order management and workflow tools).
- Integration with the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange's "dynamic allocation" feature, which maximizes revenue by enabling publishers to open up their ad space to bids from multiple ad networks.
Labels: Google
Bing Gains 5% Share in January 2010
| Manoj Jasra - Thursday, February 11, 2010 0 Comments |
Percentage of U.S. searches among leading search engine providers | |||
| Domain | December 2009 | January 2010 | Month-over-month |
| www.google.com | 72.25% | 71.49% | -1% |
| search.yahoo.com | 14.83% | 14.57% | -2% |
| www.bing.com* | 8.92% | 9.37% | 5% |
| www.ask.com | 2.54% | 2.64% | 4% |
| Note: Data is based on four-week rolling periods (ending Jan. 2, 2010, and Jan. 31, 2010) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Figures are for Web searches only. | |||
| *This includes executed searches on Bing.com but does not include searches on Club.Live.com. | |||
| Source: Experian Hitwise | |||
Google Accounts for 67.3% of Searches in December
| Manoj Jasra - Thursday, January 14, 2010 0 Comments |
| Top 10 Search Providers for December 2009, Ranked by Searches (U.S.) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Rank | Provider | Searches (000) | Share of Searches |
| All Search | 9,945,576 | 100.0% | |
| 1 | Google Search | 6,697,223 | 67.3% |
| 2 | Yahoo! Search | 1,434,866 | 14.4% |
| 3 | MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search | 986,247 | 9.9% |
| 4 | AOL Search | 247,421 | 2.5% |
| 5 | Ask.com Search | 168,674 | 1.7% |
| 6 | My Web Search | 99,474 | 1.0% |
| 7 | Comcast Search | 50,325 | 0.5% |
| 8 | NexTag Search | 41,393 | 0.4% |
| 9 | BizRate Search | 31,612 | 0.3% |
| 10 | Yellow Pages Search | 27,914 | 0.3% |
| Source: The Nielsen Company | |||
Google Chrome Passes Safari in Market Share
| Manoj Jasra - Monday, January 04, 2010 2 Comments |
With the release of the Chrome beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux, it was only a matter of time before Safari was passed by. December makes it official. Chrome is now at 4.63 percent of browser share, followed by Safari at 4.46 percent. Safari appears to have plateaued at around 4.5 percent of total share. - the Apple Blog
Google Friend Connect Integrates with Twitter
| Manoj Jasra - Monday, December 07, 2009 0 Comments |
...we're bringing Twitter and Friend Connect even closer together. Now you can join one of over nine million Google Friend Connect sites using your Twitter login. Once signed in, your Twitter profile will be automatically linked and you can tweet your new site membership, share discussions from the comments gadget, and invite your friends via Twitter.



