Beantin

10 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 29-31, 2010)

BBC News website’s content management and publishing systems

The BBC Internet blog often produces some really good in-depth insights into how things work at the BBC. This time, in connection with the recent redesign of BBC News, they take a look at web management, web standards & their in-house CMS

5 new social memetrackers

Twingly Channels is a social news reader what gives you the possibility to aggregate feeds and real-time search results into a single channel where many people sharing the same interest can view, comment and vote on the content.

Google search: Delivering what you want

When you enter something into a search engine, you’ve got a question and you want an answer. It’s a simple premise. Google consistently tries to improve that service - to point you in the right direction, or where possible give you the information you are looking for directly in the search results. No extra click required. Task complete!

Football World Cup 2010

Google has, not surprisingly, pushed out a whole load of helpful onebox results (also referred to as integrated results) for the duration of the World Cup. Searching for world cup gives you live scores and upcoming fixtures.

England group table

Searching for a particular team, such as “England group table”, gives you England’s group table and their upcoming fixtures.

It’s genius in it’s simplicity. If you search for england group table at the moment, you’re only after one thing. Google knows that, so it shows it. There’s no marketing hullabullo. There’s no attempt to distract you from your task in hand. No hidden agenda. You had a task to solve and Google solved it.

The answer served on a plate

I’ve discovered three World Cup onebox variations so far, giving specific answers directly on the search result page. I’m expecting that Google are keeping their eyes on the search trends and we’re likely to see more variations before the tournament is over. (Top scorers perhaps? Red and yellow cards?)

If only more websites tried as hard as Google to help visitors with the tasks they want to complete. Google’s functional simplicity is second to none.

10 important consequences of personal search results

Today, Simon Sundén published a post in Swedish called personalising search results as standard. It is no longer limited to those who are logged in. This has some pretty large consequences for search results and keyword rankings. The inclusion of real-time results and the upcoming Caffeine update are important; but personalised results as standard is a major change rather than a significant tweak.

In simple terms, it means that you’re less likely to get the same search result with the same search times in different browsers, or on different computers (and in different countries, logged in to google or not). SERPs suddenly got a whole lot more complicated.

Here’s a brief translation of the 10 consequences Simon described in detail on his blog, with followed by description:

1. Lots of companies think that they rank highest, but in reality they aren’t seen at all

It’s going to have to be explained a lot of times, but searching yourself is no longer empirical evidence that you’re poorly ranked, or well ranked.

2. Google me! or, well, don’t

Universal guaranteed search terms that rank high, won’t be quite as guaranteed anymore.

3. Optimise titles and descriptions!

Conversions from SERPs to clicks is even more important as clicks in results are now part of the ranking equation. Titles and descriptions are what are shown.

4. More important to optimise for all search types

Optimise for all search results - blended search; image, news, real-time, video. Everything that’s just not the classic organic search result.

5. Tuffer times for Ranking tools

Keyword ranking tools suddenly became a lot less accurate. They still have a roll to play as an indicator, but less so as a firm statistic.

6. Wide content scope is beneficial

As Google value well-visited sites, it’s even more important that you take good care of your visitors (or searchers so that they become visitors!)

7. Statistics even more important

It’s going to be more important to collect statistics about exactly which page visitors have come from via search engines; 1st, 2nd, 3rd?

8. Google webmaster reports become important… again

The “Top search queries” report becomes more relevant the more personalised results become. It’s the new ranking tool.

9. Bye, bye “Don’t be Evil” Google!

Google has take even one step further to being all-conquering and all-important. will be harder and hard to be perceived as not doing evil.

10. Bye, bye paid-rankings?

Various companies provide paid servicing giving top 3 or top 10 results on Google. What happens to that business model now?

Google is shaping our Internet. With almost every announcement they have the power to change not only our lives but also our businesses.