Hatton Marketing

There are a few changes afoot at Google in the search results which you should be noticing soon if you haven’t spotted them already.

First up is Google’s new implementation of ‘real time search’. Do a search for a well discussed, often updated topic such as “copenhagen” and you’re likely to get ‘live’ updates from Twitter rotating on your screen. You can also get Google to show you the latest updates by selecting the ‘options’ menu item at the top of the results screen. and selecting ‘latest’. So if you’re a brand with a lively social media profile, get ready to see very new, and potentially uncontrollable results coming up for your brand name in the real time results. Talk to us if you’re interested in finding out how we can help monitor your online brand profile and find out who is saying what about you.

Google have also been increasing the personalisation of results. Previously, if you were logged in to your Google account you could vote results up and down, but now even if you’re not logged in, Google will take account of your previous searches and sites you visited to adjust the results to you. Personalisation of results will mean that traditional measures of a website’s success like keyword ranking (where you appear in the search engines for a keyword) will increasingly become less important in favour of visitor metrics – how long people stay on a site, how many pages they look at, what they actually DO when they’re there etc. So make sure you’ve got an analytics package installed to give you the full picture of how people are getting to – and using – your website. Talk to us if you’re not sure about this, or how to read the data you get.

Next up – we’re all used to seeing breadcrumb navigation on websites with multilevel navigation, but now Google are showing these breadcrumbs within the search results as well. This gives users the ability to jump to pages within the breadcrumb trail, rather than just the individual page returned for the results. Owners of large sites need to make sure that Google can easily understand the architecture and navigation of their site to take advantage of this.

Finally there are a bunch of more geeky new releases from Google, like the new Google Operating System, ChromeOS (and who’d bet against them taking on Microsoft – and winning – in this area?) However, our favourite new thing from Google is probably Google Goggles. This ‘visual search’ application can be used by mobile phones with the Android operating system (e.g. the HTC Magic). Take a picture of something, and you can now search Google with that picture – for example, take a picture of a landmark and it can give you Wikipedia information about it or take a picture of a bottle of wine and it can tell you which shops sell it locally!