Archive for September, 2010

Google originally wowed internet users with its refreshing simplicity. The search engine’s spartan, easy-to-use interface won over legions of internet users at a time when other search engines – or “portals” – had become cluttered and confusing.

Google still has a flair for the understated, but the search engine giant has also been tinkering a lot lately with new search features and interface enhancements that many feel border on distracting. Here’s a rundown of what’s happened to your Google search page recently, along with some tips on how you can get back the simplicity you might miss.

If you start typing into Google, and the search field suddenly flies up to the top of your browser window, you know you’re dealing with the new feature that Google calls Instant. In essence, Instant attempts to update search results in real-time, as you type. So, for example, if you’re searching for “ms word templates”, the search results will be updated with each few characters.

Eventually, Instant figures out what you’re searching for based upon what others have searched for, and this usually happens a few characters before you finish typing. At that point, you can stop typing and simply select the best search result from those presented.

You might find Instant’s constant screen redrawing more distracting than helpful. If so, you can turn Instant off by searching for the faint “Instant is on” drop-down arrow to the right of the search field and selecting Off. You have to start typing, however, before that drop-down appears.

In an effort to make search results more personalised, Google introduced its Star rating system earlier this year. As a result, if you have a Google account and are signed in to the search engine, you’ll note that each item in a list of search results now includes a hollow star to the right of the title.

Click that star, and it turns yellow. What also happens, behind the scenes, is that the item is added to your customised list of favourite sites and will appear at the top of a list of search results when the page is relevant to what you’re seeking.

Here’s an example. Let’s say that after searching for “Hemingway,” you see the Wikipedia entry for Ernest Hemingway among the list of search results, and you click the star next to that entry. The next day, you conduct a search for one of Hemingway’s books – perhaps “The Sun Also Rises.”

At the top of the list of search results will be a “Starred results” section, which will include the Wikipedia link that you starred the previous day. In this way, over time, the starred results system allows you to influence the search results that you see.

Want to disable starred search results? You’ll need to click the Sign Out link in the upper right-hand corner of Google to sign out of your account.

Occasionally when you’re searching with Google you’ll see a scrolling box within the search results, with new search results appearing as you watch. This is what Google calls “real-time search”, a feature designed to leverage constantly changing social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Originally rolled out late last year, real-time search has grown in popularity so much that Google recently rolled out an entirely new product called Google Realtime, which is devoted solely to capturing results from the web’s premier social networks.

Google Realtime draws heavily from Twitter and Facebook to supply its search results. But Google claims that Realtime will also inherit some of the personalisation emphasis given to the mothership Google by allowing multiple ways to customise your search results. Among them is a conversations view, which allows you to follow the entire thread of a conversation on Twitter instead of seeing only a single entry, or “tweet.” However, the customisation options are not readily apparent in the current iteration of Realtime.

If you thought that the community-minded Google would never try to monetise its main search page, you were wrong. A Google “Sponsored links” list now appears alongside – or at the top of – virtually every list of search results. Those sponsored links are, of course, paid advertisements.

In its official description of sponsored links, Google attempts to play down the commercialisation of its search results by pointing out that it filters ads so that only those that are most relevant to your searches will appear. Regardless, however, these sponsored links remain advertisements, and it’s important to remember that they appear alongside your search results not because they are necessarily the most relevant to your search term but because they were purchased.

The Google Everything sidebar is another recent addition to Google that attempts to put more relevant search options at your fingertips. Consequently, the sidebar, which appears to the left of your search results, contains links to other Google repositories of information – including videos, discussion groups, images, news, maps, and more – that probably also contain relevant information related to your search term.

On the social web, though, the Everything sidebar has received as much criticism as praise. That’s primarily because it’s not possible to get rid of it.

If you long for the days when Google was not cluttering its search results page with lots of features that you never use, you’re not alone. Search the internet, and you’ll find a plethora of tricks designed to remove features that Google has added. These tricks mostly have one thing in common: they don’t work.

There is one tact, however, that you can still take to get a no-nonsense Google page: use Google’s mobile site. Although the site is designed to run on small mobile devices, like smartphones, it works just fine from your desktop or laptop as well. And it’s refreshingly devoid of “stars”, real-time search, “instant,” sponsored links, and most of the other new features that might be making you long for the Google of a decade ago.

Search engine marketing giants Google have announced the launch of their new ‘Instant’ product.

The new service which will be rolled out worldwide in the next week, will predict what users are searching for from the moment they start typing. As the users begin writing a word, Google’s homepage will list search results which will be refined and updated as more letters are typed.

According to Google, “dynamically predicting what people search for reduces the time it takes to enter a typical query by 50 per cent.” The product which is already available to users who are logged into Google accounts, will save searchers between two and five seconds per query. The average query time should fall from approximately 24 seconds to around 20 seconds per search.

Those users searching on particularly slow connections will automatically be encouraged to use the original Google search, but will be given the option to select “Instant.” Google, which answers an average of 1 billion search queries per day said the move was a “fundamental change.”

As cited in the Daily Mail, the post on the official Google Blog said: “Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions-yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful.”

“The user benefits of Google Instant are many-but the primary one is time saved. Our testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search. With Google Instant, we estimate that we’ll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!”

The Justice Department is trying to determine whether Google Inc. would gain too much sway over the online travel industry by acquiring ITA Software Inc., which powers the Web’s most popular airline-ticket search and booking sites, said people familiar with the department’s review.

The merger investigation is at an early stage, but according to people familiar with the situation, Justice antitrust authorities are focusing on two potential areas of concern: whether rivals would continue to have access to ITA’s data and whether Google would unfairly steer Web searchers to its own travel services.

Several players in the online travel industry said they are expressing concerns to government lawyers in hopes of spurring them to challenge Google’s deal to buy ITA. They said Google would instantly become the new gateway for finding airfares and could promote its travel search engine over other sites’ search engines, among other things.

Late last month, Google said the Justice Department is embarking on an extended review of its proposed $700 million acquisition of ITA but the Internet search giant didn’t specify the department’s concrete concerns.

ITA software is used by flight-comparison sites including Kayak.com, SideStep.com and Hotwire.com, among others, as well as by Bing, the Internet-search engine owned by Microsoft Corp. ITA also powers the ticket-search and booking sites of numerous airlines, including American and Continental, giving it insight into how airlines price their seats.

Government lawyers are asking executives in the $80 billion online travel market if Google could unfairly disadvantage potential new rivals by cutting off their access to ITA’s software, people familiar with the questioning said.

The lawyers also are inquiring about whether Google would direct users of its search engine to the travel-search service it plans to build around ITA’s technology—to the detriment of soon-to-be rivals that currently get traffic from Google’s search engine, these people said.

Google currently directs users searching for travel itineraries to Kayak.com and other sites.

Hot Ticket

Software firm ITA powers many popular airfare search and booking sites, including:

• Orbitz
• Hotwire
• Kayak
• TripAdvisor
• CheapTickets
• Airline sites such as Southwest, Continental, United, US Airways and American

Google is confident the government “will conclude that online travel will remain competitive after this acquisition closes,” said Andrew Silverman, a Google senior product manager, in a blog post last week.

The company has said its latest acquisition shouldn’t raise antitrust concerns because it doesn’t compete with ITA.

Some travel companies voiced their worries. “There are legitimate concerns…about what that deal could mean to competition in the market and how it could affect consumer choice,” said Robert Birge, Kayak’s chief marketing officer.

The Justice Department has interviewed executives or spoken to representatives of numerous companies. Among them are Microsoft, Orbitz Worldwide Inc., Kayak and Expedia Inc.—which owns Hotwire.com, TripAdvisor.com and Expedia.com — according to officials at those companies or people familiar with the matter.

Microsoft, Expedia and Kayak have expressed concerns to the Justice Department about the deal, arguing that combining the top Web-search company with the top airfare-search firm would give Google an unfair competitive advantage, people involved in the discussions said.

Other competitors have been more supportive. “Innovation in online travel has been stuck,” said Atanas Christov, chief executive of Vayant Travel Technologies LLC, which competes with ITA to provide search technology to airlines and travel websites.

Mr. Christov said he told the Justice Department last month that he favored the ITA deal if ITA’s technology is made available to more companies, including his own.

Today’s airfare searches can take up to a half a minute—a relatively long time in the online world—and users don’t get many ways to customize them, Mr. Christov said. For example, he said, business travelers would have trouble searching for a trip from New York to San Francisco with a five-hour layover in Chicago so they could attend a meeting.

With Google’s computing power, the ITA technology could “create itineraries nobody else has and price it…in milliseconds,” Mr. Christov said.

ITA software is used by flight-comparison sites including Kayak.com, SideStep.com and Hotwire.com, among others, as well as by Microsoft’s Bing.

From its stronghold in Web search— it handles more than 60% of Internet searches world-wide—Google has pushed into a wide range of other markets, such as selling mobile phones, developing broadband Internet, and online payments, sometimes through acquisitions of smaller firms.

So far, the company has been blocked by federal antitrust authorities only once — when it sought an advertising agreement with Web search rival Yahoo Inc. two years ago. But it faces closer scrutiny each time it buys a new company.

One concern is whether the company is using its dominance in Web search to give an unfair advantage to its other ventures. Google’s critics say the company has a history of directing users to its own services at the expense of rivals’. When users search for a location or product, for example, Google sometimes brings up Google Maps or Google Product Search results above all other results.

And some critics also have claimed Google pushes links to competitors’ sites lower in search results.

Google has steadfastly denied claims of anticompetitive behavior. On Friday Google said the Texas attorney general’s office is reviewing similar claims by several small companies that previously filed lawsuits against it.

The company said it doesn’t plan to sell airline tickets to consumers— meaning it would direct traffic to sites that do—but could sell ads alongside its travel search results. Selling tickets would put Google into direct competition with online travel booking companies such as Expedia and Orbitz. Orbitz uses ITA software.

Google says ITA has several competitors that provide flight search technology, including software from Amadeus Holding IT SA, Travelport LP and Expedia. That means ITA’s customers have other options.

A spokesman for Orbitz said the company told Justice Department lawyers there were alternatives to ITA if its technology became unavailable.

An Amadeus spokeswoman said the company was “watching this development with interest” and believed the European Commission also would scrutinize the deal.

Google says ITA’s European revenues aren’t large enough to warrant regulatory review there.

Travelport couldn’t be reached for comment.

Google has said its aim with ITA is to create new search tools. Two former ITA employees said in interviews that Google could help users find itineraries and prices to travel across different modes of transportation, from the cab that takes them to the airport to the hotel at their destination.

Many antitrust experts believe that the Justice Department is unlikely to try to block the transaction, in part because Google and ITA aren’t direct competitors. But Governments lawyers are seeking to fully understand its business plan before taking a view on the transaction, said people familiar with the matter.

AOL has announced that it has renewed its service and search engine marketing deal with Google for another five years.

Since 2002, Google has powered AOL’s search services as well as advertising via paid search engine marketing ads on AOL search. Both companies have a revenue sharing arrangement where Google is paid per-search conducted on AOL.

According to Reuters, this arrangement led AOL’s advertising revenue associated with Google to a total of $209 million in the six months ending in June 2010. The previous contract, signed in 2006, was set to expire in December and AOL has said that it entered discussions with several search companies before ultimately choosing to return to its existing partner.

“We wanted a better product and better revenue and better distribution of AOL content,” said Tim Armstrong, chief executive of AOL.

Under the terms of the new deal, AOL will also be able to extend its content marketing activities to YouTube with both companies sharing the ad revenue related to the videos. Both companies are also said to be working together on an AOL mobile search product, as AOL seeks to renew its focus on mobile apps and content.

“After nearly a decade long-partnership in search, we’re looking forward to expanding our global relationship to mobile search and YouTube,” said Armstrong. “All aspects of our partnership will be improved by this deal.”