Home > News and Views > Newsletter > July 2007

Google marketshare less secure, Adsense on password protected pages, Google supplemental results not labelled

1. Google to treat underscores as word separators.

   • Google employee Matt Cutts has recently announced that Google, the only remaining large search engine not to do so, will soon be treating underscores in the same way as hyphens.
   • This change has not yet been implemented in the UK at the time of writing, but webmasters should be aware that this is subject to change in the near future.

2. Google acquires GrandCentral Communications

   • GrandCentral Communications are a company who provide technology to allow users to have a single telephone number which they can access via the web, but which can communicate with all their normal telephones.
   • GrandCentral's technology fits well into Google's efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between their users.

3. Google market share not as secure as it was and not as strong as it appeared?

   • The latest search engine market share numbers for June from Compete show Google losing over four percentage points, almost entirely to Microsoft, dropping from 67% of the market to 62.7% from May to June, a drop larger than Ask.com's entire market share.

4. Yahoo! implement search suggestions.

   • Yahoo! have introduced a search suggestion feature on yahoo.com which works in the same way as Google Suggest and already existed in the Yahoo! Toolbar in Firefox.
   • To quote Yahoo! Search's Kevin Lee: "Search Suggest isn't new, just new to Yahoo.com".

5. Google to introduce 'unavailable_after' tag

   • Dan Crowe (Google's Director of Crawl Systems) has said "Google is coming out with a new tag called "unavailable_after" which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it. Or perhaps you write articles that are free for a particular amount of time, but then get moved to a paid-subscription area of your site."

6. Google launches Message Centre

   • Google have announced that they have added a feature in their webmasters console service which they can use to send webmasters messages. To begin with these will cover search quality issues only, but they hope to expand and the service is multi-lingual. This follows problems with the old 'Dear John' emails being spoofed by nefarious webmasters.

7. Google cookies expire earlier to 'protect privacy'

   • Following the announcement in March that they are Google have announced that server search logs (including IP addresses and cookie ID numbers) are being anonomysed after 18 months, Google has stated that their cookies will now expire after a fixed time period to improve user privacy.
   • The reality is that, with a 2 year cookie auto-expiry date, it is unlikely that many users will spend enough time absent from any Google products for their cookie to expire.

8. Small business site search.

   • Google have announced a cheaper, smaller scale paid-for-site-search option for small business.
   • Google Custom Search Business Edition is being heralded as a Google-hosted and affordable solution that's easy to setup and administer.

9. Google AdSense Launches Site Authentication

   • The Site Authentication feature enables webmasters to give the AdSense crawler access to password protected pages.
   • Once AdSense is provided with a username and password, the crawler can gain access to those protected pages and be able to serve up relevant ads based on the content.

10. Microsoft Office Live to allow users to buy adverts on Ask.com

    • Microsoft Office Live is to add Ask Sponsored Listings to its adManager advertising service.
    • The move, enabling those using Microsoft's adManager to easily advertise on Live.com and MSN as well as on Ask.com, is reportedly the first time that any of the top five search engines have joined together to offer search engine ads to advertisers in five years.

11. Yahoo Update

    • Yahoo! have issued a weather report, stating that they updated web data, crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms between the 19th and 23rd July, so any fluctuations in Yahoo! SERPs at that time may well be attributed to the shuffle, although things should have settled by now.

12. AskEraser

    • Ask.com are to launch a product called AskEraser, which will be opt-in and will delete search records at time of search (or shortly afterwards).
    • Ask will also follow Google's lead and implement an 18-month anonymisation process, where IP address and cookie information will be removed from the search query data.

13. Digg moves from Google to Microsoft advertising

    • Digg has exchanged Google as it's ad provider for a three-year exclusive ad deal with Microsoft.
    • Microsoft will be providing the display and contextual advertising on Digg's popular social news site, with traffic estimated at over 17 million unique monthly visitors.
    • The biggest loser in this deal appears to be Federated Media who are losing the 143,280,000 pageviews a month which they were previously selling adverts on.

14. Google loses GMail trademark case in Germany

    • Google has been banned from using the name Gmail in Germany, following a trademark case filed by Daniel Giersch. The court has ruled that the case is so unambiguous that no appeal will be received.
    • An unpleasant outcome of this is that Google are suing Giersch, who began using the name G-Mail in 2000, four years before Google, in Spain, Switzerland and Portugal.
    • A court in Switzerland has already dismissed Google's case and Giersch intends to file a counter suit in that country.

15. Google's Udi Manber: "20 to 25% of the queries we see today, we have never seen before"

    • Udi Manber, Google's VP of Engineering, gave a brief 15 minute presentation at Supernova's searchology event entitled 'Search is a Hard Problem'. He laid out three reasons why this is the case:
      1. Scale and diversity are almost beyond comprehension
      2. Expectations and needs will continue to grow
      3. 20 to 25% of the queries we see today, we have never seen before
    • The fact that almost a quarter of the queries that Google receives every day goes a long way towards demonstrating the power of the long tail of search.

16. US court rules that web contracts cannot be updated online

    • A federal appeals court has ruled that companies can't change their contracts and post those revisions online without notifying customers first.
    • This was borne out of a private individual suing Talk America for changing the terms of his contract (including the cost of the service) without notifying him. The court found that "Parties to a contract have no obligation to check the terms on a periodic basis to learn whether they have been changed by the other side." and stated that "a revised contract is merely an offer and does not bind the parties until it is accepted.", in effect meaning that all parties will, in future, have to be alerted to the changes in contract individually for the changes to be enforced.
    • What the repercussions of this will be for such agreements as Google's Terms of Service and the like remains to be seen.

17. Google to stop labelling Supplemental Results

    • Google have announced that, due to their claimed improvements to the Supplemental Results index narrowing the gap between it and the main web index, they will be ceasing to label sites in the Supplemental index as such within the SERPs