Electric Ego » Google

Google Voice Search – Now talk to your Search Engine

kash — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 22:20:00 +0000

Google has had a pretty big year in terms of improvements. First, they introduce +1 and now they introduce voice search for desktop. While voice search has been a big part of Android for years, desktop users have had to stick to typing. Google used all of the voice data it has been collecting on Android to hone desktop search into a well-oiled machine.

The effectiveness of voice search is surprisingly good. Google is leading the pack when it comes to voice recognition. Despite trying to stump it with uncommon words, out of the 50 or so times I used voice search it only misheard me twice. This includes searches involving names and book titles. It’s clear that Google has been putting all those mobile voice searches to good use.

In order to use Google voice search, you need a computer with an Internet connection and a microphone. Most laptops ship with a microphone built in. Once you have your microphone hooked up, navigate to Google.com. You should notice right away a little microphone icon in the far right of the search bar. Clicking this icon allows you to speak into the microphone. Simply say what it is your searching for. For example, “sporting good store nearby” and it should automatically search for you. You can choose to send data about what you’re searching for to Google to help them improve the service. So far it is working great and in time, it’s sure to get even better. You can try it out for yourself right now at Google.com.

Contributed Post:
Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and recent graduate of Elon University. She is currently a resident blogger at Online Degrees, where recently she’s been researching the very best paying degrees and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

Thumbnail previews on Google Search

kash — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:24:30 +0000

Google seems to be doing a lot these days. After Google Instant, it has come up with another intuitive (though not much innovative) page results thumbnail previews feature. This is probably another attempt to enhance search experience for users or (perhaps a move to beat Bing). Note Bing is already offering similar thumbnail previews of webpages on search results pages. Google thumbnail previews are although a little different than how Bing displays its previews. The larger thumbnail is shown as soon as you hover the mouse over a search result. A somewhat similar functionality is already offered in image results where a larger preview of image is displayed after clicking.

Looks like the feature is experimental for now, there is no mention in the official google blog and very few people have actually spotted it.

There is a video also showing Page previews in Google search results. Watch it here..

www.youtube.com/watch?v=73WWs9Ts-00

How intuitive do you think thumbnail previews in search results are? Share in your comments.

Google Public DNS aiming Speed & Security

kash — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 08:31:23 +0000

A little while back, on Dec-3-2009, Google introduced Google Public DNS.

Per the official Google blog,

As people begin to use Google Public DNS, we plan to share what we learn with the broader web community and other DNS providers, to improve the browsing experience for Internet users globally. The goal of Google Public DNS is to benefit users worldwide while also helping the tens of thousands of DNS resolvers improve their services, ultimately making the web faster for everyone.

For those who have no inkling as to what a DNS is, head on to Domain Name System on Wikipedia. Domain Name System is like a telephone directory for the Internet. It helps in translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses. For example, www.some-domain-name-xyz.com translates to a similar IP like 208.77.188.166.

As with all other Google products, Google public DNS also focuses on mainly speed and security. Google claims that by using their DNS service, your browsing will be speedier and secure. To start using Google public DNS, you will need to make changes to your TCP/IP properties and set preferred DNS server to any of the following:
IP: 8.8.8.8
IP: 8.8.4.4

In windows xp, go to Local Area connection properties under Network connections in control panel. Select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and point the DNS servers to google’s DNS IP address above.

So, if your ISP’s DNS server is occassionally itchy, give you problems often or is a bit slow (though usually DNS hosted by the ISP are fastest for their network), you may want to switch to Google’s DNS offering. I have been using it since its launch along with OpenDNS and am quite satisfied with the speed.

Should you care about Search Engine Optimization for your Website

kash — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:48:28 +0000

Few of my friends have been expecting of me to post something on Search engine optimization or SEO in short. SEO is a vast domain and it is impossible to cover it entirely in this post, I’ll try to highlight few tips for the newbies who intend to become Search engine optimizers or SEO specialists. Before proceeding further, keep in mind that not everyone can be be worthy of being called a Search engine optimizer and it certainly isn’t easy to become one. It isn’t just that you employ few on-page and offpage optimization tricks and will get results in your targeted search engines. Don’t expect results overnight.

There are a vast number of factors minor and major ones, known or unknown to you that influence rankings in Google or Yahoo or any other engine you plan on targeting. The Elite SEO specialists are very few that really hit hard on competition and bring results. Merely doing SEO data entry work like doing things like posting in forums or posting comments in blogs just to get a little link juice won’t make you SEO and will never get you anywhere. Search engine optimization is one of the critical elements of overall Internet marketing strategy. Failure to optimize your website for search engines can result in a considerable loss in terms of free advertising which is essentially gained from ranking well with search engines. This article will provide a little understanding of what SEO is and will explain why Internet marketing requires at least some degree of SEO.

SEO for website is a carefully crafted strategy in which a website is designed to obtain favorable search engine rankings from popular search engines. This may be achieved in a variety of different ways and optimal SEO strategies combine a variety of different strategies to complete one well orchestrated SEO campaign. There are several elements to consider when attempting to optimize your website for search engines. This may or may not include keyword relevance, keyword density, prominence, META tags (although they are less valued these days but still play a little role), titles and inbound links. Keyword research is important. You should also consider keyword relevance and density as they are one of the most common SEO strategies and essentially involves using relevant keywords often in the content of a website to demonstrate the relevance of these keywords to the website. This is important because search engines are likely to reward websites with optimal keyword densities with favorable search engine rankings in an effort to provide Internet users with the most relevant websites for particular search terms.

The prominence of keywords should also be considered. The common mistake with this strategy is to believe the first opportunity to incorporate keywords is in the first line of visible text on the webpage. This is not true because search engines crawl the code of a website as opposed to the visible content on the website. This means there are multiple opportunities to incorporate relevant keywords long before the actual visible content on the website.

Another area of concern which is important is inbound links. Inbound links are essentially links which reside on other websites and direct traffic to your website. These links are considered important because many search engines place a value on inbound links because they are essentially an example of one website recommending another website. However, when obtaining inbound links it is important todo so from other websites which rank well with search engines because many search engines consider the rank of the original website when determining the value of the inbound link.

Now that we have briefly explained some of the main concept of SEO, we will illustrate why it is important to optimize your website in the first place. SEO is so important because most Internet users highly value the results of search engines and are likely to only visit to ranking websites when they search for a particular keyword. Internet users trust search engines to serve the most relevant content first and are therefore not likely to visit websites which do not fall on the first or second page of search results. This means websites which rank well essentially are receiving a great deal of free advertising from search engines that place their websitein a key position. Website owners who do not invest time into optimizing their websites miss out on a great deal of potential web traffic.

In the end, since search engines are always evolving, their algorithm keeps on changing, one trick that had worked for you in the past may not work that well now. The key is if Search Engine evolve, you as a SEO specialist do also!

Twitter Google and Real time indexing in Search

kash — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:46:22 +0000

There has been quite a speculation in the past few months that Google has set its eyes on aquiring Twitter. Some Analysts have been speculating that Twitters’ real time search could spell trouble for Google. In all its might, Google is still far away from being a real time search and then of course it is mighty hard to incorporate a real time searching and indexing billions & trillions of webpages. Imagine the load it will put on webservers if Google even increases its bot activity by twice of its current average rate. It is simply not feasible. See here http://www.pandia.com/sew/2085-real-time-indexing-in-google.html how real time indexing is the new in-thing in search engine business.

It is nothing new that Google has been experimenting with near real time web indexing for years. For instance, I have noticed many times on Yahoo Answers that no sooner did I finish posting an answer, it is indexed almost instantaneously and begins to appear in Google search results. This Electric Ego blog has also witnessed the same earlier. Some of my early posts managed to get indexed within minutes of hitting the publish button. Although now a days, it does not enjoy the same luxury. Others have noticed the same here http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/10/google-already-indexing-real-time-web.html

Whether Google will acquire Twitter or not, only Time will tell. For now, all I can surmise is that Twitters’ presence is affecting Search Engines and their Business in quite a way. You have probably heard of Microsoft announcing a search deal with Twitter and Facebook and then Google jumping in to the arena with a similar search deal with Twitter. Per Google blog here,

“We are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

Needless to say that you’ll be noticing more of twitter pages and tweets in search results on prominent positions in the coming days. I have noted some interesting things with this Electric ego blog and its twitter page at http://twitter.com/egoelectric. See, how nicely the Twitter page has outranked the Blog to second position for the keyword ‘electric ego blog’.

Also see how Google’s describing the twitter page below.

Twitter is without doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now.

This brings me to the end here. Have you also noticed something similar? Any thoughts on how tweets should come up in search results? Would you prefer your tweets finding a way in google search results? Share with us.