Category Archives: Search Engines

Just a few hours after Microsoft announced that it would be adding Twitter tweets to its search results, Google has announced that they will be doing the same. Unlike Microsoft, which released a beta version of their Twitter search along with their announcement, Google will introduce a product that “showcases how tweets can make search better” in the coming months. The move by both search engines is part of their strategies to  integrate more real-time information into their search results.

During Google’s third quarter earnings calls Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt reported that Google had a 30 percent quarter-over-quarter increase in mobile searches during the quarter. Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s Senior Vice President of Product Management, said that smart phone adoption was a driver of growth and that mobile search has grown twice as fast as desktop search during the last year in Japan and some other markets. Schmidt also reported that Google made over 120 “search quality improvements” during the quarter.

Google has announced that they have added a number of new features to Search Options, their search results filtering tool included in the search results page. The tool already provided a number of options for filtering results based on the when the pages were created and now can filter results from the past hour and from a specified date range. Results can now also be filtered to include more or fewer shopping sites. Users who are signed into a Google Account and Web History enabled can have results filtered to include or exclude pages they have already visited. The Search Options tool was released in May.

Google has announced that they have begun to include links to section of web pages in their search results. The new links come in two forms, the first form provides a set links to section of the web page relevant to the search query and the second form provides a link to jump to  specific section of the page relevant to the search query. When these links are shown is determined algorithmically, but Google has provided information on what will provides the best chance for these links being shown. Anchor are needed in the web page so that sections of the page can be linked to, the anchors should use descriptive names, and there should be a “table of contents” which links to the anchors.

Google has added the ability for webmaster to instruct Google to ignore URL parameters in Webmaster Tools. URL parameters are name/value pairs appended to end of URLs (example: http://www.example.com?sessionid=1232132). The problem with URL parameters is that each URL created by a variation of parameter may or may not change the contents of a web page, so search engines treat each version as a separate web page. When they are actually the same it can have as serious negative impact on the indexing and ranking of the pages in search engines. In general it is better not use URL parameters in these situations, but the new feature should help to better handle situation where they do exist. In help documentation for the new feature, Google states that up to 15 parameters can be set to be ignored and that they will treat the “requests as suggestions rather than directives.” Parameter handling can be found in the Settings section of the Webmaster Tools. Yahoo has provided the ability to set parameters to ignore, as well as well allowing a default value to be set for parameters, for some time.