Google updated their search engine today.

They key points:

• Google introduce Universal Search, integrating news, images, videos, books and local results into the main  results: “Google’s vision for universal search is to ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking for”.
• Google introduce a context-sensitive navigation menu – dynamically generated navigation links have been added above the search results to suggest additional information that is relevant to a user’s query.
• Google launch Google Experimental,which allows users to try out new search features.

Further select reading and reviews:

• Google’s Official Press Release
• Danny Sullivan’s excellent write-up, including the consequences for SEMs
• Techcrunch
  
• Videocast (”featuring” some very tedious user stories spouting undying Google love – I switched off. Also note the Microsoft-y colors used beneath the Searchology logo….)

Seems some adwords advertisers wanted a bit more out of visitors than visitors may have wanted to give:

 ”Google has removed paid links that advertised seemingly legitimate Web sites but actually tried to install nefarious programs on PCs. The links were displayed as “sponsored links” after visitors entered specific queries into Google’s search service. Clicking the links would ultimately go to a legitimate site, but by way of another site that attempted a “drive-by installation” of password-stealing software. Miscreants placed the links using Google’s AdWords service for advertisers. “Google identified and canceled AdWords accounts displaying ads that re-directed users to malicious sites,” a company representative wrote on a corporate blog“.

Google recently added presentations to their suite of Office-like products, so what’s next?

WebWorker Daily suggests:

• Project management
• Contact management
• File storage and sharing
• Online discussion groups
• Wiki
• Video chat
• Web meetings

Google will be integrating the latest news headlines into the main body of search engine results when searches appear relevant to the news.

As Jim points out, that’s rather big news for SEO.

Well, SEOs who also run news-related blogs.

• PROS
• Having and maintaining a business blog will have additional benefits.
• Blogs that have been accepted by Google News as a news resource will now have the potential to attain a massive increase in traffic when they appear in search engine results.
• There will now be even more benefit to writing quality blog posts that are on the cutting edge of news.
• Google will most definitely make friends with the Press conglomerates by providing extra exposure. This strengthening of ties may open up different sources of media-rich content for Google’s users.
• CONS 
• Having and maintaining a business blog will be more important than ever. Why is this a con? Maintaining an active blog requires significant resources.
• Search result pages may now be longer and force users to scroll farther down to see the complete top 10 listings. As a result, having top 5 rankings will become even more important.
• The future potential for news SPAM will increase astronomically. After all, these sought after rankings will be prime targets for spammers that don’t mind creating false news to generate clicks.

Ok, I admit Google profit announcements are no longer news.

 ”Google Inc., owner of the most-used Internet search engine, said first-quarter profit rose 69 percent as it increased advertising sales worldwide and took more market share from Yahoo! Inc“

We kinda look forward to the day when Google fails to post record profits, just to give us something new to talk about.

You’ll recall Google launched a search history feature back in February. Now they’re changed the service to Web History, which records sites you visit.

That’s either a bit creepy, or really rather useful.

Perhaps both. I guess it saves having to bookmark pages and it’s certainly interesting to see your personal web trends.

Danny has a good overview.

With enough take-up, Google has a real chance of ridding the world of irrelevant content. They simply aggregate visitor patterns, see which sites people use the most, and alter their SERPs accordingly.

Content is not king. Popularity is.

Apparently.

Google have ditched “Froogle”, and gone for the somewhat less clever name “Google Product Search”.

The reason for the change?

“We were a really young company, and I don’t think we really understood the burden of a new brand,” said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google. “I also think it was very hard to build awareness. Our product offering was very robust, but it will fare better with a Google Product Search name.”

Understandable, really. Google have been integrating functionality, portal-stylee, for a while now. Froogle also seemed to sit on the outside, for some reason.

At the time of publication, Danny couldn’t see the changes, although they do appear to be live now. A lot cleaner, and closer in layout and appearance to Google search.

E-bay has bought StumbleUpon, the toolbar that helps you stumble across other sites users have recommended.

The Wall Street Journal had this to say about StumbleUpon:

“Next time you want to wander the Web, forget about Googling it. Stumble it“

I bring that quote up, because it describes a trend that’s been emerging in search for some time, and becoming more obvious of late.

The search world is changing.

Clearly, Google haven’t been asleep. For starters, they were rumored to be one of the bidders:

“Google, AOL and eBay as potential suitors. A source with knowledge of the deal now says the company has signed a term sheet with eBay to be acquired. The price is somewhere between $40 – $75 million“

And no sooner has Ebay announced the acquisition, Google integrates something remarkably similar to StumbleUpon into their toolbar. You can add a button, featuring a pair of dice, which, when clicked, recommends sites you might like, based on your search history.

Search has been about pulling results based on your request. Increasingly, it’s about pushing results to you, based on your past actions and preferences.

Community and personalization aspects are being integrated deep into search. Eric Schmidt stated that a lot of the value of YouTube to Google is that YouTube is not just a video sharing site, it is also a search function.

YouTube is also a place – a community. Those aspects won’t be lost on Google.

And where you have community on the web, you have ways to measure, and draw meaning from, human interaction. The aspect of community interaction is not something that has featured heavily in search engines in the past, apart from PageRank/citation (which is now looking increasingly clumsy), but it will surely do so going forward.

What does this trend mean to search marketers?

Google has always been a popularity engine, and aquisitions of these types are about measuring what is, and isn’t, popular amongst crowds.

Search marketing, and SEO in particular, has always been about being popular. Or, feigning popularity. If community metrics are going to become a bigger part of search, the skillset required will focus a lot more on the “M” in SEM.

Webmasters spend their time trying to get into Google, but there are times when webmasters want out.

Google has released tools for doing just that.

“As always, the answer begins: it depends on the type of content that you want to remove. Our webmaster help center provides detailed information about each situation. Once we recrawl that page, we’ll remove the content from our index automatically. But if you’d like to expedite the removal rather than wait for the next crawl, the way to do that has just gotten easier“

Google provide documentation on different scenarios, including, interestingly enough, content from a site you don’t actually own:

“Requesting removal of content you don’t own

But what if you want to request removal of content that’s located on a site that you don’t own? It’s just gotten easier to do that as well. Our new Webpage removal request tool steps through the process for each type of removal request”.

Very interesting.

The scraper sites that have been “borrowing” content all these years may be the first against the wall.

This time, he’s at Web 2.0 ™ Expo.

Interesting bits:

• “We don’t think its a competitor to Microsoft Office”. Uh huh.
• “Advertising is an art and a science. We can provide the science to the artists”. And Spamsense-ers.
• Advertisers are worried that, with DoubleClick, Google might have too much information about their business.
• “Viacom is using the suit as a negotiating tactic…”
• “….of great interest to Google’s business–mobile applications and ad services that use the targeting available in mobile platforms, and the local space, taking more advantage of the local content inherent in the Web and mining it for targeted advertising.”