Marketing Pilgrim

We like Google here at Marketing Pilgrim. Oftentimes it’s because they doing something to madden the online world so we can write about how silly they are. Other times we wonder why they aren’t doing more. And on occasions like today, we point out something good.

With the earthquakes in Japan there is a tsunami alert that has been issued. Google is using it’s traditionally message free home page for search to alert the world. That’s well done.

It’s easy to poke holes in a company that is doing probably too many things at once but it’s important to recognize when they use their power for good as well.

Let’s pray for the people in the regions under these alerts and hope they stay as alerts only.

It’s been almost 7 months since Google announced that you can make Google Voice calls from within your Gmail account.

It’s been almost 7 months of waiting and wondering just when exactly Google plans to add this feature for us Google Apps for Business users. You know, the ones that actually pay to use Google’s services?

You’d think that Google would have figured this out by now. But, no. Google Apps, despite being one of Google’s few premium subscription products, seems to be the red-headed step-child of new product features. We just don’t get these features added when Gmail does.

Adding salt to the wounds, we learn that Gmail users will now be able to click any telephone number in an email and call that number using Google Voice.

Just a quick update.

After speculating that Google’s instant search would be the target of a patent lawsuit from MasterObjects–just as soon as they had finished with Amazon–it looks like the company’s not going to hang around for an outcome.

It appears that the company is ready to go after Google right now:

I asked Masterobjects why they waited until now to sue Amazon.com, which started offering ‘search suggestions’ (using technology which Masterobjects alleges infringes it patent) back in 2008. I also asked why they singled out Amazon specifically.

In a brief response, the company tells me that they will not comment on either this case or the complaint they’ve just filed against Google, revealing that the search giant is effectively already under legal attack by the software maker.

Google is taking more steps to create a truly personal search experience. Now, if you don’t like results from a site you a can remove those results from that domain completely from your future searches. Talk about the ability to get rid of content farms!

The Google blog states

You’ve probably had the experience where you’ve clicked a result and it wasn’t quite what you were looking for. Many times you’ll head right back to Google. Perhaps the result just wasn’t quite right, but sometimes you may dislike the site in general, whether it’s offensive, pornographic or of generally low quality. For times like these, you’ll start seeing a new option to block particular domains from your future search results. Now when you click a result and then return to Google, you’ll find a new link next to “Cached” that reads “Block all example.com results.”

There’s too much information out there and not enough time in the day, so why not let your industry peers help you sort through the clutter!

That’s the pitch for LinkedIn’s new social news aggregator LinkedIn Today.  Set up newspaper style, the program delivers “top” stories for the industries LinkedIn has associated with your professional profile. The stories are a mix of items shared by your network, your peers and “professionals” (ie, everyone else) and mostly they appear to be gleaned from Twitter.

At a glance, there appears to be a lot of options and levels of information that you can narrow down yourself with a variety of check boxes. However, a lot of what you’ll find here is just more noise and clutter. For example, some stories have a small blue banner with a number. Click this and you’ll see a list of people who shared this link on Twitter. You could use this list to find new people to follow on Twitter, so that’s helpful.

It’s time for the monthly pondering of whether Google is losing its strangehold on the lead in search market in the US. Experian Hitwise has released its numbers for February 2011.

In Google’s position any move backwards is considered trouble so a 2% decrease from January to February is not great news. Bing powered search, on the other hand, continues to show progress moving up 4% from January.

Where Bing claims victory is in Experian’s metric of search success rate. Those numbers are unchanged with Bing doing very well compared to its nemesis.

Month to month numbers are hard to draw conclusions from but Bing continues to inch forward and Google seems to have stalled. Of course stalling is relative when your market share is twice that of your nearest competitor which consists of two outlets rather than Google’s single platform.