Google & Adobe have collaborated to introduce new technology that enables indexing of Flash. This means textual content in SWF files & URLs embedded in Flash could be indexed by Google now. Prior to this Google’s Flash algorithm was able to crawl only (X)HTML architectures without executing JavaScript to access text content and/or URLs in Flash.

With this new algorithm Google would be able to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds and Flash “gadgets” as well such as menus or buttons, self-contained Flash websites and everything in between. However, as mentioned on Google’s blog, Google would not be able to index FLV files like videos that play on YouTube. Reason for this might be that these files contain no text elements.

Conclusion: This will force advertisers to think of more innovative ways to target the markets & who knows we might see flash based ads on content sites.

Sites that were totally made in flash posed various difficulties from SEO point of view. Now all these problems can be sorted easily & flash based websites can be optimized easily.

This technology is still in beta stage & we are not able to ascertain how effective it is & it might still require some time to get used to it.

If you want to mark search results in Google or like to add your own notes regarding site that you thought useful, you can use searchwiki to do so.

SearchWiki enables you to customize search by deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. You can alter search results to the top or down with a single click. With this new feature, you can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel are relevant. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in future.

SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. Google store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page.

The changes you make will only affect your own searches that come up when you search when logged in. But, if the comments provided by any Google user it will be visible to another google user as well. SearchWiki also is a great way to share your insights with other searchers. This new feature makes the search results more dynamic and thus improves your search queries.

Conclusion: This will improve the overall user experience by providing relevant results & will also helps in improving search engine effectiveness.

Yahoo launched its new Search Assist for image search. Kaushal Kurapati, Director of Product Management of Yahoo Search writes on his blog: Look Before You Click: Search Assist for Image Search:

We recently launched Search Assist for image search to guide users to the answers they seek in a new way. To better enhance the search experience, we took a two-tiered approach to the query formulation and refinement process. In the first stage, we’ve maintained the same paradigm of text suggestions that have helped users of web search complete and refine queries. The second stage is new - from now on, Search Assist can be opened after a query is entered into the search box for users to preview sample thumbnails for the top related search terms.

Here is the example of Search Assist for Image Search: if some one searches for Puppies in image search, the type of results can be previewed before one reaches the final results. Searching for puppies in image search will give cute puppies, pit bull puppies, german shepherd puppies before clicking on the suggestion. This way, one can know what type or category of images he/she can expect before digging down deeper to find answers.

Search Assist for images has already been launched on the search results page and we’ll be launching it on Yahoo.com soon.

The web can be a dangerous place; there are threats around every corner. In recent years, threats coming from web pages have significantly increased, from malicious programs hosted on web pages, to downloads that manipulate your computer and steal your personal information. In the past, these threats mainly came from questionable websites, but today even reputable sites can turn bad, which means that everyone is at risk for malware.

Live Search’s announced that while crawling the web, Live Search assess whether a page contains any malicious element or exhibits any malicious behavior, and then flag questionable pages with a warning message:

“Our primary goal is to protect you from a potentially harmful page. You can still decide to risk it and visit the page, but we strongly urge against it and recommend always following our security guide Protect Your Computer.”

“If a reputable web page has been flagged, the website has most likely been abused by a malicious third party. On the Live Search Webmaster Center blog, we provide webmasters with information on how to fix and secure their websites from future abuse. We also encourage webmasters to sign up for our Webmaster Tools, which can alert them when malicious content on detected on their site.”

Christian Seifert, Software Design Engineer, Live Search Anti-Spam & Anti-Malware Team

Source:http://blogs.msdn.com/

Comment – Great improvement! Users should always be aware that cybercriminals are taking advantage of web services. Many people will be protected with these warnings. Google and Yahoo have also recently started notifying malicious element.

Google has announced a new service that will be adding magazines to its Google Book Search service. As posted by Dave Foulser, Software Engineer on Officaial Google Blog:

We’re announcing an initiative to help bring more magazine archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony.

This is another step by Google to capture information market. Various rare archives would be made available to public which were not available before thus opening new dimension for the users.

Google have now updated their ad policy for hard alcohol and liquer targeting the U.S. The UK will follow suit in the coming weeks.

Google had already quietly changed their policy at the end of October allowing PPC ads for beer. However according to the Inside Adwords blog the new rules are for promotion and branding rather than direct sale which are still not allowed -

“To comply with the updated hard alcohol and liqueurs policy, advertisers must promote the information about hard alcohol and liqueurs that their websites contain, such as recipes and brand messages. Ads that directly promote the sale of hard alcohol and liqueurs are still not permissible through our program. In contrast, advertisements for beer may directly promote its sale.“

The news comes after Google firstly removed their keyword trademark policy in the UK and then permitted advertising for online gambling in the UK, Italy, France and Spain.

Google have finally given advertisers the ability to assign different levels of access to users of their Adwords accounts. The new Roles and Permissions Beta being introduced across all countries and languages, allows advertisers to offer three levels of access to users - Administrative, Standard, and Reports. Google explain the Beta in the below paragraph :

Roles and Permissions Beta

We are excited to test a new Beta Feature for the Google AdWords Program that helps you manage your AdWords account security and privacy.(this update is a little old - it has now passed the pilot & is a permanent feature).With this test, advertisers and agencies have the ability to assign three different user access levels for each AdWords account - Administrative, standard, and reports. These new access levels increase security by allowing you to assign or remove the level of access from anyone you want. Also, these new access levels maintain privacy by ensuring recipients get email appropriate to the user’s access level.

* Reports Access is the most important feature for agencies like us as it grants ‘read-only’ access of an account to us. As we generally require an account’s access to analyze it & make a proposal, this would help us in case a prospective client is skeptical about we making changes in his account before he hands over the management to us.

This is a positive move by Google, although it’s not before time. Yahoo, who have traditionally been the slower of the two engines to offer innovative features to advertisers, included this feature in their new Panama interface. Google have been quite slow in offering a feature that many advertisers, particularly agencies whose clients often request access to their accounts, feel is vital to the smooth running of a campaign (and harmony between clients / account managers!!). Still, Adwords now has read-only account access, and this can only be a good thing.

One can follow this link to read more:

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=70619

Google Adwords has changed the way the Campaign Summary and Ad Group Summary pages in an account present statistics. This is in order to give additional level of detail into a campaign’s performance. Previously, these pages divided statistics into two categories: search, which included Google and search partners, and the content network.

Now, they show one set of statistics for Google and another set aggregating search partner performance. Search partners include AOL, Ask.com, and many other search sites around the web. One can view ad group or campaign performance at a summary level, or broken down by different combinations of Google, their search partners, and their content network. Additionally, separate Google and aggregate search partner statistics will soon be available in the Report Center.

Earlier this year, Google Suggest finally made it to the Google home page. The feature suggests queries as you begin typing in the search box. Now Google is testing providing links to web sites, direct answers and even ads that appear within the Google Suggest list.

Not everyone will see these changes. Google’s showing them to a small, randomly selected group of people in the US. The experiment might end at any time and not necessarily become a permanent feature.

The most dramatic change is the inclusion of AdWords ads in this box. Here are some of the ones that have been spotted:
In the one above, typing the characters [new...] gave an ad for Newsweek. On continueing on, doing [new york t...], rather than seeing a link to the New York Times as with the example shown earlier, this ad from the New York Times itself was shown.
And here’s yet another ad that appeared on typing [up...]:

For one thing, it’s way too easy for people to click on an ad to reach a web site where Google should be sending them to for free. So, this is yet another means the giant has worked out to pocket dollars !

This update relates to images being included in a normal PPC ad displayed on SERPs. Till date, we used to have the option of running image/banner PPC ads on Google’s Content Network. However, this is something different Google has come up with.

Some AdWords ads on Google are now showing associated images — and getting much larger in the space they take up — through a “Show products from” Plus Box implementation that some are seeing now when searching at Google.

For instance, trying to search for bluenile, brings up a Blue Nile ad. Under the usual ad title and description is a plus symbol (called a Plus Box), followed by the words, “Show products from Blue Nile for bluenile.” If one clicks on the box, it opens up three product listings from Blue Nile, each listing with an associated image.

The most striking part of this ad is that how much room it takes up. Below is how the ad looks when it is closed:

When one clicks to open up the product results, the whole visible part of the page is consumed with this one ad. Here is an image of just the ad, that measures about 370 pixels tall :

The ad also shows on the right hand side. This implementation is better for some because it does not change how the natural/free results are shown but rather only pushes down other ads on the right hand side.

Images associated with search ads are not too surprising. We have seen implementations of video ads in Adwords several times. It just seems that Google is willing to try anything now when it comes to ads, from video to images to multimedia and who knows what.

Source URL : http://searchengineland.com/google-adwords-now-with-images-15242

Comments: Though this would give a good reason for advertisers to go in for sponsored ads, the downside it could have is that such ads on the right hand side might shift other sponsored ads on the 2nd or subsequent pages. This could increase the competitiveness of keywords further as advertisers will have to bid higher to sustain their ads on the first page even after such ads are opened up & viewed. This could be a killer in this sense!