These are my links for March 6th through March 8th:
From the Google Blog
* Winning the Multi-Agency Game: Can’t We All Just Get Along? – Some survival tips for when you’re asked to work with your clients’ other agencies. …
* This week in search 3/7/10 – This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. – Ed.
This week’s enhancements include:
Stars in search
Every day, we work to improve the four key components of search: comprehensiveness, latency, user experience and relevance. Of these, relevance is dramatically enhanced by more personalized results. This week, we announced a new feature that makes it much easier to mark and rediscover your favorite content. Stars in search are just like the stars you see in Google Toolbar or in Maps — they act like bookmarks. When you star a search result, and it happens to appear again in future results, you’ll see that you already found that particular result. Starred items will appear at the top of your results. Stars in search has been rolling out this week, and will be available globally for all users who are signed in to their Google account.
Auto-spell for images
This week, we unveiled automatic spell correction for images. In cases where we’re highly confident you had intended to type something else, we’ll replace results from the typo query with those from the spell-corrected version — just like when you misspell a query in Google search. Ultimately, this change will reduce the time it takes to get you the result you’re looking for (and that’s a good thing).
Example searches: [butterflys], [roman architecture] and [apollo ohno]
Sidewiki page owner entry
In September, we launched Sidewiki, which lets you contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a Chrome extension. Afterward, webmasters asked, “How can I quickly put Sidewiki on all pages of my site?” Now webmasters can create a special entry, called a page owner entry, that appears above all entries written by users. Webmaster tool improvements ultimately create a better web experience for us all, so we’re pleased about this. Let us know what you think about our webmaster enhancements.
Stay tuned for next week’s news on more search launches.
Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search
* Outside.in vs. AOL Patch: Win-Win? – Matthew Ingram at GigaOm has a nice profile of Outside.in and interview with CEO Mark Josephson. The piece points out that AOL is planning to spend $50 million to build Patch into a giant local network, and asks whether sites like Outside.in should be worried. First here’s what AOL said in a 10K filing about [...]
* SMBs Are Getting Older – Here are some interesting stats drawn from an article in the NY Times about people starting their own businesses at 50 and older: More than five million Americans age 55 or older run their own businesses or are otherwise self-employed, according to the Small Business Administration. And the number of self-employed people ages 55 to 64 is [...]
* Roost Launches FB App for Local Realtors – Roost CEO Alex Chang sent me a note last week alerting me to the launch of the company’s app on Facebook, “Social Real Estate.” It enables local agents to create a “real estate” tab on their pages full of market data and other information.
Chang explained, “The Roost app allows a local agent or broker to configure a free [...]
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