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YeeHaw! Bing Makes Searching Easier with Lasso

posted on July 5, 2011

The joy of reading digitally is that you can easily drill down deeper into any idea simply by cutting, pasting and searching as you go. Reading a review of a summer movie might have you searching for other films by the same director. An article about the health benefits of blueberries could trigger a search for recipes or even a local grower so you can pick you own.

On a computer, the mouse makes it easy to grab these phrases and go, but that same action is cumbersome on mobile devices. According to Bing, your average cut and paste search takes nine steps, but with their new app upgrade, you can do it in two (sort of).

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Online Ad Spending Predicted to Top 50 Billion in Five Years

posted on July 5, 2011

Are you spending more money on online advertising? If so, you’re not alone. According to new numbers from eMarketer, almost every category of online advertising is growing and will continue to do so into 2015. At that time, they expect the market to hit 49.50 billion.

Search still claims the top spot for dollars spent, but video is the fastest growing format. The old fashioned banner ad is still climbing and email is the only category that slipped.

Who is benefiting from the rise in online ad dollars? The big five, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL and Facebook. eMarketer says that combined, they’ll claim 68% of 2011’s total online ad spending. That still leaves a nice chunk for smaller ad network and individual site buys which eMarketer recommends as a way of staying connected to a specific industry.

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Watch Out! Google’s Chrome Creeping Upward In Browser Share

posted on July 5, 2011

If I didn’t know better I might say that Google is beginning to turn the massive search only ship around quite a bit in the recent past.

Of course, it would be in their best interest to have a few more areas of success to keep the regulatory spotlight shining less brightly on their search dominance.

The latest information comes from NetMarketShare (hat tip to @btabke). Note that this data has not been checked by Quality Assurance according to the NMS site but, hey, that’s never stopped a blogger from reporting the cold, hard ‘facts’ in the past ;-) .

Here’s the picture version

And for you folks who like numbers here is more information

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Get Your Facebook Friends Into Google+

posted on July 5, 2011

Mark Zuckerberg may be the most popular guy on Google+ currently but I suspect he doesn’t like the idea of people migrating their Facebook friends over to the Google product en masse. Of course, that doesn’t stop folks from trying.

The guys over at ZDNet are really trying to help. Last week Andrew Mager posted one way to get the whole shooting match over to Google+

Here’s a trick to get everyone from your Facebook social graph into Google Plus:

1. Sign up for a Yahoo! Mail account, and import all of your Facebook contacts. Click “Contacts” at the top, and then “Import Contacts”. Authorize Facebook access to your Yahoo! address book.
2. Log in to Google Plus (http://plus.google.com) and navigate to your “Circles” (https://plus.google.com/circles).
3. Click “Find and Invite”, and then click Yahoo! Import your Facebook friends to the “Suggestions” section.
4. Drag everyone into the appropriate “Circle”. See screenshot below.

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Google’s Product Graveyard [Infographic]

posted on July 5, 2011

This is by no means a prediction about Google+.

In fact, if the initial reviews (which are mixed but with some heavy hitters buying in pretty big) then maybe, just maybe, this list won’t include the latest social effort from the search giant.

For now though, it is interesting to see just how much experimentation the Goog has done and they haven’t been afraid to fail! And to show the continued pace of product flameouts, just this past weekend Realtime Search was shelved (it is supposed to be back we just don’t know when) and now Wonder Wheel meeting a more permanent fate.

This infographic from our friends at Wordstream shows just what kind of product wreckage Google has experienced.

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Twitter and Google End Agreement; Realtime Search Goes on Hiatus

posted on July 4, 2011

Google’s Realtime Search went offline this past weekend and it’s not because of integration into Google+ as a Google spokesperson apparently “misspoke”. Instead it’s due to the expiration of an agreement between the two companies.

Danny Sullivan reports at Search Engine Land

Google send us this explanation:

Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2.

While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google.

Google says that the service will relaunch at some yet to be determined future time and will be filled with Google+ updates (rather limited at this time for sure) and many other sources.

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Happy 4th of July!

posted on July 4, 2011

Have a happy and safe holiday as we celebrate our freedom here in the United States of America.