Real-time search shows you the latest breaking news the moment it’s happening from social media postings.

From Google:

“First, we’re introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.

Try searching for your favorite TV show, sporting event or the latest development on a recent government bill. Whether it’s an eyewitness tweet, a breaking news story or a fresh blog post, you can find it on Google right after it’s published on the web.”

Watch this Video:

If you were sharp, you would had noticed this “latest news” feature in the recent World Cup 2010, especially when a goal was scored.

To know how we could help you dominate the Search Engines in Real Time search? Contact SEO Singapore agency at +65 9450-0295 or info@advantageseo.net.

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“Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.” Source

You can listen to more about Google Instant in the video below:

In fact, every other article I read about Google Instant says that this is the end of SEO.

An articles says that, if you are searching for “red striped socks”, and “Redbox” or “Red Stripe beer” showed up in the query, the user may deviate from their original search.

If you click on the other suggested answers from Google Instant, chances are that you are distracted by the “Google Suggest” function rather than your intent of search had changed.

End of the day, if your purpose of search is to buy a “red striped socks”, you would go back to your query to search for it again.

Another article says “no two people will see the same web results”. well, but that is “Personalised Search” which had already been around.

I don’t agree that Google Instant would affect the basis of SEO.

The simple theory is: Why is the user searching in the first place if he doesn’t know what he wants?  To try out Google Instant?

If your site is not properly optimized for the right keywords in the first place, you are not getting anywhere, be it Google Instant or not!

This is the simple reason that I feel that  SEO is still relevant (not because that this is our business).

In fact, if you had done a good SEO effort, you site should come up Tops due to Google Instant.

Nevertheless, most SEO practitioners are having a wait and see attitude and in fact, I don’t seems to find any Singapore SEO players commenting on this topic.

For the time being, Google Instant is not available in Google Singapore yet, as it is been rolled out in phrases. But if you want to try it out, go to Google.com.

Keen to know how we can get your site more traffic regardless with Google Instant, call us at +65 6640 9987, or visit our SEO Singapore site.

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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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1. Google Instant: Is SEO Still Relevant?
2. What is SEO?
3. Benefits of SEO?

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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The report was carried out by the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, it found only half of the 10 reporting countries had more than a majority of Internet users.

Both developed and less-developed countries reported relatively low percentages of Internet users, including Mexico (32 percent), Portugal (37%), Cyprus and Colombia (45%), Czech Republic (51%), and Chile (55%).

Only three countries and regions report more than 60 percent of respondents as Internet users: Macao (61%), the United States (78%) and Sweden (80%).

“These findings reinforce that the Internet is not yet part of life for hundreds of millions of people around the globe — even in technologically advanced countries,” said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future, which created and manages the World Internet Project.

“And we are seeing large numbers of non-users even in countries with high levels of education and employment, long histories of Internet use, and high percentages of broadband installation.”

The report found notable differences between men and women and their use of online technology. In six of the WIP countries, eight percent or more men than women use the Internet (Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Italy, Macao, Mexico). The gender gap is the largest in Mexico (16% more men than women are Internet users) and Colombia (15% more men than women.

In four of the WIP countries, the gap in Internet use between men and women is four percent or less, with the Czech Republic, Portugal, Sweden, and the United States reporting only slightly higher percentages of men than women as users.

“Countries that reported an average of five or more years of Internet use found key disparities in access to online technology,” said Cole.

“For example, many countries have a long way to go to increase Internet equality among men and women.”

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“Location has become an important part of the way we search. If you’re a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer’s market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information,” says Google Product Manager Jackie Bavaro.

“One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don’t have to worry about adding ‘Minneapolis’ to your query and missing webpages that only say ‘St. Paul” or “Twin Cities,’” Bavaro adds.

Google has been using users’ locations to deliver search results for quite some time, but this marks the first time the search engine is actually letting users dictate when they want it to be used to retrieve results for specific queries. In local search, Google is generally pretty good at delivering nearby results anyway, but giving users this added little bit of control can’t hurt, and simply gives users another way to refine their results to match their preferences.

Users can view results by their default location, or set a custom location. The feature is currently only available on Google.com in English.

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“Three out of four experts said our use of the Internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the Internet has improved reading, writing and rendering of knowledge,” said Janna Anderson, study co-author and director of the Imagining the Internet Center.

“There are still many people, however, who are critics of the impact of Google, Wikipedia and other online tools.”

Two-thirds of those surveyed said reading and writing skills and the rendering of knowledge will be improved by 2020 due to the influence of the Internet.

Eighty percent of the experts agreed that “hot gadgets and applications that will capture the imagination of users in 2020 will often come ‘out of the blue.”‘

The experts were fairly divided on whether anonymous online activity will exist in 2020, with nearly 40 percent predicting that anonymous Internet users will have their access sharply decreased.

“The privacy and civil liberties battles over the next decade will increasingly focus on the growing demands for identity credentials,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“New systems for authentication will bring new problems, as more identity information will create new opportunities for criminals.”

On the issue of an open Internet in the future, nearly two-thirds said the Internet will remain as its founder envisioned.

More than a third chose to agree with the statement “the Internet will mostly become a technology where intermediary institutions that control the architecture and content will be successful in gaining the right to manage information and the method by which people access it.”

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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’s purchase of Aardvark is simply an acknowledgement that Q&A is the future of search. As the #1 brand in Q&A, we’ve been passionate about investing in this next phase of search for a long time.  Our current technology is unmatched at answering questions using content we’ve crawled and indexed from across the web.  In Q2, we’ll also beta launch a Q+A community that will route the questions we receive to real people with relevant knowledge. This community will reach search engine scale – able to handle more than a million questions a day, faster than Google or any of our competitors. We’re singularly focused on Q+A because, in the end, we believe that consumers rather Ask a question, than Google one.”

Original Article: Google has reportedly acquired Aardvark, which operates at Vark.com, for around $50 million. Aardvark is a Q&A site. This is a space Ask.com says it is the number one brand for. Ask sees this move by Google as a direct challenge. “Bottom line, this move validates the space we have been #1 in for years,” the company says. “It’s Google coming after us and our mission.”

We spoke to Ask Networks President Scott Garrell, who says, “We welcome the challenge”.

A head start in Q&A that is, and Ask views this as even more important to people than web search. The reasoning for this is that web search relies on published information, while Q&A includes unpublished knowledge from people. According to Garrell, Ask gets three to four times more questions as a percentage of total queries than Google.

Ask, while not among the top three in terms of search market share, has managed to gain U.S. market share recently. In fact, from December to January, while Google dropped a percentage point and Yahoo dropped 2, Ask gained 4, according to the latest data from Experian Hitwise.

But Ask is focused more on the Q&A side of things, because it feels like that’s what it is truly good at, and the company appears to feel comfortable in that role. Garrell says Ask has the best answers from technology and from people.

“We have a head start,” says Garrell. Ask plans to launch a beta of a new, updated version of Ask.com in Q2.

Aardvark is a little bit different of a beast than Ask. Aardvark is more like a Q&A site/social network hybrid, and it’s difficult to say just what Google intends to do with it at this time. Will it continue to operate as a standalone entity only, or will Google look to integrate this kind of answer into its own search results at some point? We’ll have to wait and see on that one.

One thing Aardvark has going for it is that it can be integrated right into Gmail chat. The social aspect of Aardvark combined with the recently launched Google Buzz, could turn Gmail into a much more social presence altogether.

On a sidenote, on Aardvark, I asked if Google was coming after Ask.com with the Aardvark acquisition, and I got responses like ”Ask is so yesterday…” and “Aardvark isn’t really in competition with Ask.com.” Ask clearly doesn’t see it that way. This very example illustrates that Q&A search (at least Aardvark’s brand) is prone to just delivering different opinions from people. Granted, the question wasn’t one that would lend to a factual answer.

What do you think? What site do you use to get questions answered?

Related posts:

1. Google Displays Site Hierarchies in Search Results
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There is no reason to be indexed in Google. … You haven’t gotten anything back

But he failed to disclose how his Mahalo investment loots content.

If Google is a vampire (while sending away billions of Dollars of traffic for free) then what does that make Mahalo (which borrows your titles and abstracts as content to pull search traffic into their ad cluttered pages pages, while placing your content below the fold (while using nofollow on attribution links))?

Is the following accurate?

If you think otherwise, then please explain.

Danny Sullivan TORE UP Mark Cuban in a must read article which only Danny could have wrote. It is well worth a read for anyone who wants to understand the hypocrisy behind the Mahalo position on content scraping / vampiring.

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