As a company, Google focuses on three key areas: Search, Ads and Apps. Search is our core technology; ads are our central business proposition; and apps are the umbrella over our web-based software that you can access anywhere, any time. While each of these has a lot of technology under the hood, the basic tenets for Search, Ads and Apps are very simple. We’ve created some short videos explaining the principles behind our core services. For more information or to share your thoughts, visit ourHelp Forum.

How Search Works

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs&feature=player_embedded#!

Source: http://www.google.com/howgoogleworks/

Search Engine Optimization Singapore is the process of improving a website such that it best follows the Search Engine’s algorithm, and eventually gets the website highly ranked on the natural results, and thus more traffic.

Google has a complex set of 200 algorithms!

If you like to know how you could get yourself on the first page of Google’s natural results, look for a good Singapore SEO agency to advise you. Contact us at +65 9450-0295 or info@advantageseo.net

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We spend a lot of time thinking about search results, but we also spend a lot of time thinking about search queries. Today we’re announcing three enhancements to help you input your searches more quickly and easily: more localized Google Suggest, improved spell correction for names and auto-correction for 31 languages.

Feel at home with Google Suggest
Last year we launched localized Google Suggest by country, offering relevant popular search queries tailored for different regions. However, just as people in the U.K. often look for different things than people in U.S., we’ve found that people in Seattle tend to look for different things than people in Dallas. So last week, we rolled out a version of Google Suggest that is tailored to specific metro areas in the U.S. You may notice that the list of queries beneath the search box will seem more locally relevant than it used to:

• In San Francisco [bart] is probably not Bart Simpson; it’s probably Bay Area Rapid Transit:

• In Chicago it’s easy to find out about your local NBA team:

While saving you that unnecessary click, we make search that much faster.

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You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged aboutsite performance.

• Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality Team

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

Apart from improving your site speed, there are said to be over 200+ algorithm that can affect your site rankings in Google.

Read more about our Singapore SEO methodologies and know-how or contact us at tel: +65 94500295 or http://www.advantageseo.sg/contact-us

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By Aaron Smith, CNNMoney.com staff writerApril 1, 2010: 11:22 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — In the rich tradition of April Fool’s Day pranks, Google has renamed itself after Topeka, Kan., accompanied by an absurd explanation from the company’s chief.

On Thursday morning, the company’s home page was titled “Topeka” instead of “Google,” although still in its distinctive blue-red-yellow-green font.

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How Google, er, Topeka’s home page looked Thursday morning.
Why? Because in March, Topeka Mayor Bill Bunten announced that he was informally changing the name of his town to “Google,” just for one month. He told CNN that he was doing it for “fun.” This is Google’s tit-for-tat explanation, according to its official blog, posted by CEO Eric Schmidt.

“Whatever the outcome, the conclusion is clear: we aren’t in Google anymore,” blogs Schmidt.

April Fool’s Day carries a long tradition for pranks and punks, which affect every aspect of life, from the school yard to the board room. Since the advent of the Internet, companies and individuals have gotten inundated with funky e-mails making wild claims, on this day in particular.

Google has made a name for itself as one of the more proactive pranksters in the business world. Every year on April 1, the company tries to punk its followers with a new prank.

Past pranks
The naughtiness stems back to 2000, when Google claimed that its “MentalPlex” could read your mind through your computer screen, allowing users to conduct searches on sheer brain power.

“With MentalPlex, you just project a mental picture of what you want to find,” explained Google, in its 2000 posting, accompanied by a hypnotic spiral.

Last year, Google claimed its site was featuring the world’s first 3D browser, but this was just another case of April Fool’s bunk.

The strange tradition of April Fools’ mass media pranks goes back to 1957, when the BBC broadcast a weird and untrue television segment about Swiss farmers harvesting spaghetti from trees.

Naturally, many of the viewers mistakenly thought the BBC story was real.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/01/technology/google_april_fools/index.htm

Google's April Fool Joke 2010

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Original Article (11/19): Google is testing a new user interface for its search options feature. If you are unfamiliar with the search options feature, it is the link on your search results page that says “show options” and brings up a menu on the left-hand side of the screen providing a number of ways to filter your results.

According to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, a “small number” of Google users will see the new interface starting today. The aim of the new interface is to provide users with a cleaner display. Sullivan says that if the testing goes well, Google may roll it out after the New Year. He quotes Google’s Marissa Mayer as saying, “We’re basically looking at a new look and feel for Google. It’s an overall cleaning up of the search engine results page.”

Do you think Google’s results pages need a new look and feel? Tell us what you think.

Images of this new look and feel look strangely familiar – similar to that of a certain “decision engine.” Take a look:

Of course, the Google’s search options and Bing have been compared in the past (and other search engines utilize a similar design too for that matter), in terms of the general layout. Their functionalities differ on various levels. It’s important to note that this will just be how the search results pages will look, without having to click the search options link to get to it. There has been discussion in the past about how much users actually use Google’s search options, simply because the feature is easy to overlook. Such a change would put the options right in your face.

Besides being visually different, the options themselves are different in some areas. For example, a “see also” section has been added, which suggests related queries. There is also a section called “show search tools,” which now contains things like the Wonder Wheel, Timeline View, and “more shopping sites.”

Google may start messing around with the top navigation on search results pages next year, but the company has acknowledged that it works well right now. It will be interesting to see the change in use of this top navigation if the left-hand options go mainstream.

What do you think of this re-working of Google’s search results pages? Do you want to see it go mainstream, or do you like it better how it is right now? Share your thoughts.

Related Articles:

> Google Launches Search Options

> Google Presents New Image Search Options

> Google’s Search Options Increase

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“One of the things we spend a lot of time thinking about at Google is how we can make the world’s information more accessible and useful to people all over the globe,” Google says. “This includes providing rich local geographic data because, after all, a huge number of search queries have a geographic component. Our efforts to start putting Africa on a map kicked off back in 2009 when we announced the launch of Google Maps for Kenya. Not long afterwords, we announced that users across 45 African countries could build and edit maps in Map Maker. Most recently, we launched Google Maps for South Africa.”

With Google Maps launching domains for 30 more countries, that means not only scenery and roads for these countries, but also local business listings, which can drive a lot of business to brick and mortars. Search engines have all but replaced print yellow pages for many people, and businesses in these countries should feel the effects of that as the listings grow.

Google is encouraging users in the new countries to get involved and help them make the maps better. “You know your local area better than we do, which is why Map Maker is on offer. With Map Maker, any user can create or edit map data, ranging from schools to local businesses, national parks to taxi stops. If you know your local area, or you’ve seen something that’s missing, take up the opportunity to get mapping! As we’ve pointed out before, maps are also invaluable for governments, NGOs, universities and entrepreneurs, who can visualise, plan and market the areas and projects that they work on.”

Including islands there are now over 50 African counries with Google maps available.

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Edelman and Moore, who both call Harvard their home, coauthored a paper titled “Measuring Typosquatting Perpetrators and Funders.”  In a blog post summarizing it, they presented several sets of statistics and wrote, “According to our analysis, 57% of typo sites include Google pay-per-click ads.”

Then they made a rather more interesting comment regarding the effect of Google’s connection: “Combining our observations with financial reports and others’ estimates, we conclude that Google’s revenue from typosquatting on the top 100,000 sites is $497 million per year.”

Also, Google’s pretty much the only search engine they point a finger at, since not nearly as many ads from Yahoo and Microsoft appear on typosquatting sites.

Now, it’s necessary to mention that Edelman is involved in a lawsuit against Google (”arising out of Google’s use of typosquatting domains to display advertising”), so he may not be the least biased person in the world.  The numbers he and Moore presented are still stunning if true.

UPDATE: Ben Edelman was good enough to drop by in the comments section, and he wrote,  “Surely it’s not Google’s fault that some people misspell. But our study [shows] that typosquatters register more domains targeting companies in sectors with high PPC prices. That tells us that PPC funding is *causing* and *exacerbating* typosquatting. Without PPC payments, there would be fewer typosquatting registrations — much less reason for squatters to register these domains. Google’s payments put the system in motion; squatters register domains exactly in anticipation of getting paid by Google. Google knows where it’s showing ads. (Example: Google shows Expedia ads if you misspell Expedia, but Travelocity ads if you misspell Travelocity!) So it’s natural to look to Google for resolution of these problems.”

>> Click to read the rest of Edelman’s comment …

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According to comScore, Yahoo’s Winter Games coverage attracted 9.3 million unique visitors, more than NBC’s Olympics site (7.6 million unique visitors) and ESPN (8.4 million unique visitors). Yahoo Sports attracted over 17.5 million unique visitors over the week, more than double the visitors to its nearest competitors.

Meanwhile, NCBOlympics.com on MSN has generated more than 177.4 million page views, 414 percent more than the nearest competitor, according to comScore. NBC says visitors to its Olympic site spent more time and viewed more pages than visitors to Yahoo’s Olympic site.

On average, visitors to NBCOlympics.com spent 8.2 minutes per visit, 64 percent more than the five minute average for Yahoo users; and visitors to NBCOlympics.com on MSN averaged 27.5 pages per visit, more than seven times the 3.8 average pages per visitor for Yahoo.

While NBCOlympics.com leads in pages views and time spent, and Yahoo Sports leads in unique visitors, there is little doubt that the Winter Olympics have been good for both properties.

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Google Shopper doesn’t quite represent some breakthrough.  Instead, it combines the image recognition abilities offered by Google Goggles with the barcode-scanning feature Google Product Search for mobile introduced in May.  Plus some voice recognition tech that’s been in development for even longer.

The Google Mobile Blog explains that, as a result, “Shopper lets you find product information quickly by using your phone’s camera.  It can recognize cover art of books, CDs, DVDs, and video games, along with most barcodes.  You can also speak the name of the product you’re looking for.”

Then additional features include the ability to star items for return visits and share things with friends.

This is bound to come in handy in all sorts of situations.  Even more so, perhaps, since Google Shopper is free and seems to work rather well.  The only party that might suffer due to this development will be the retailer(s) whose customers discover they should do a lot more shopping at Amazon and Newegg.

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The attacks of course led to Google threatening to pull its business out of China, with the company believing that the Chinese government was involved. According to the New York Times, one of the schools recently discovered to be linked to the attacks has “close ties” to the Chinese military. The NYT reports:

If supported by further investigation, the findings raise as many questions as they answer, including the possibility that some of the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources.

Tracing the attacks further back, to an elite Chinese university and a vocational school, is a breakthrough in a difficult task. Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.

The names of the two schools are Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School.

Now that the attacks have been traced, you would think it would lead to some answers, but now they appear to be less certain if the government was directly involved (which is still a possibility, given that one of the schools is in a region named in an online warfare report (pdf) last year, as one of six where Chinese military would be able to conduct such an attack). It could have also been a student or a hi-jacking from another party altogether, even another country.

From the sound of things, they haven’t gotten much closer to figuring this thing out, despite a critical lead. There is a lot hanging in the balance of this case, and not just for Google’s future in China, but perhaps also international relations between the U.S. and China.

Google has not offered any comment on the matter, which is not surprising, as they have been relatively quiet about the situation since the company’s original announcement of the attacks. Earlier this month, however, there were reports that a consortium that includes Google would like to buy a 30 or 40 percent stake in Chinese firm Bus Media.

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