UK shopping market maybe smaller than the US one, but Google wants to make an impact on it as well, introducing Google Nearby Shops UK. Now, when you query for certain product via UK Google Product Search, you will have the shops selling it appearing map-style below your search, to help you locate the closest item to your location.

Of course, if you are a merchant and want to take advantage of this feature, becoming listed in those results, you need to have your shop’s URL linked to both Google Places and Google Merchant Center.

For both buyers and sellers, this combination of Google Maps and Google Products can be very useful in this Holiday season.

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You might have noticed that starting mid-December, Google is labeling certain websites with “this site may be compromised” notice that appears in the search results under the website’s link. According to Google’s Matt Curtis, this is actually done to help webmasters, noting that their website is probably being hacked. The procedure of banning sites from Google search index as noting the owners via Google Webmaster tools has proved “too slow” as not many site owners check their Webmaster Tools notifications on regular basis.

As the hacked website does not usually present an immediate threat to the visitor (if malware is detected, Google Search will show the more aggressive “This site may be harmful to your computer” message), the “this site may be compromised” notice is destined mainly towards owners, who constantly monitor their website appearance in Google search, urging them to pay an immediate attention to the problem.

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With Goggle introducing its new tool, the Google Books Ngram Viewer several days ago, many were enthusiastic about this being an ultimate feature to use in etymological research. After all, the Ngram Viewer allowed to search millions of books (Google books, of course) and then check, track, and analyze the appearances of any word throughout many centuries.

The users were enthusiastic at first, but it turned out that the tools is far from perfect. According to recent review, there are many problems and inaccuracies in Ngram Viewer reports – both expected and unexpected. A very basic issue is the OCR – Optical Character Recognition. Even for modern books and fonts, there are occasional mistakes that occur, best OCR programs report just below 1% percent error margin for a text of recognized words. For books from the 16^th and 17^th centuries, with the artistic fonts this margin is sure to be higher. One example is the letter “s” confused with “f” on numerous occasions.

Another problem observed is that for the first occurrence, as Google Books NGram Viewer does not take into account the developing of language over time, thus you have to research several forms of the world used throughout the centuries to find the actual first usage. And also, there are the reprints. Many Google books are labeled with the year of their print, instead of the year of the original manuscript, making the search produce more hits for “recent” years.

Overall, Google Books Ngram Viewer is not bad. It is just not as reliable as one could think it is. Suitable for occasional queries, it cannot be considered as reliable tool in serious academic research.

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After Google had announced its intention to acquire the renowned flight data provider ITA (the offer stands, reportedly, at 700 million USD), several serious questions arouse. Wouldn’t it be too much a step towards monopoly? What are the benefits for the customers? Why, the hell, Google is buying ITA at all?

Well, the answer to the last question is pretty obvious. In recent years, Google seems to enter every niche available in the market. Long gone are the times when Google was just a search engine. Google maps, Google news, Google Sketch-up – more and more services are provided by the enterprise and some people are already asking – is Google a Search Engine or your ultimate competitor?

However, the Google ITA offer has now encountered a serious opposition itself. A group of businesses, namely the Fairsearch.org, have gathered together in order to prevent the deal. With ITA serving about two thirds of airline ticketing and satellite websites, the ultimate “danger” – according to the Fairsearch claim – is that Google will eventually start selling tickets directly, while it has a control of data flow towards potential competitors.

Google, of course, claims that the intention is purely to improve the service, making flight data offered by Google more reliable and continuing to redirect the searchers to other websites that offer flight tickets.

With the consequences of this case remain to be seen ,  one thing is clear – more and more businesses (including the giants like Microsoft and Expedia) are concerned with Google taking over.

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Bing has introduced a new feature for the Bing Image Search. It is called “Instant Answer” and is, actually, a small bar of “tabs” that appears just below the search term box. Each tab suggests a more “specific” query, being especially helpful in the case of ambiguous search terms.

For example, when you type “heat”as the Bing Image search term, the “Instant Answer” will suggest narrowing your search to “Miami Heat”, “Heat Energy”, “Heat Wave” etc. The term “star” will feature “shortcut tabs” for filtering images of “Patrick Star”, “Star wars”, “Star of David” and more.

This feature resembles the infamous “related searches” suggestions for web search and is useful in saving our time, as we do not need to retype the whole query, using a simple click of the mouse instead.  “Instant Answer” is, however,  currently only available for the US Bing website.

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Google has recently announced that Google Instant Mobile is now available “globally”. This means that the tool is released for all countries that have Google Mobile access (there are several dozens of those) and supports almost thirty languages.

The product, similarly to Google Instant Mobile, is integrated into search features for any Android browser (built-in for Android OS 2.2 and up) , and features various algorithms that allow faster dynamic search results.

Although this release was expected (shortly after releasing Google Instant Mobile in English, the company had announced that international support is on its way) – nobody anticipated that this would happen so quickly. The roll-out took Google slightly over one month time – an incredible figure, considering the complexity of the product. Of course, this simply means that Google had been working on globalization of Google Instant Mobile simultaneously with the product itself. That is no wonder – Google had always emphasized the importance of international marketing and global support.

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Telemarketing was never a part of Google business strategy. The idea was to spread the information, get recognizable and make the clients come to them, asking for services. That’s were the sales managers stepped in, offering a variety of products, bargain deals and impressing the customer.

However, according to latest news, this has recently changed. Several hundreds of telemarketers are employed by the company, their task being to sell Google Boost and Google Tags services to local businesses at several markets in the US.

It seems the Rubicon has been crossed and Google has now “recognized” that some niches and companies should be addressed directly rather than by advertising. The next question, which should be probably answered in few months time, is whether they will expand their own telemarketing group (reportedly currently measuring 300 employees) or try to purchase an established sales force.

After all, with Groupon denying “the 6 billion offer”, Google has some money to spare…

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Everybody knows that since the introduction of the new Caffeine index, Google is able to update its site indexing within hours and even minutes. Long gone are the days when we were shown some outdated “caption” of the website content that turned out as no longer present on the page. Different was the case with images, as Google Image Search indexing was still lagging behind. It could take a month or so for the recently added image to appear in Google Image Search results.

It appears Google, in its efforts to produce real time results, is now addressing this “problem”. Several users, who are following Google image indexing closely, have reported a major improvement in this field, stating that the new images are being indexed more fluently, appearing in Google Image Search results with a delay of several days only. This is yet another proof that non-textual content is becoming more and more popular among users, making it essential for proper SEO.

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Most of us have noticed the new and improved Google search results pages by now. The biggest thing (in my opinion) is the new left hand column you get when you click the new “Show Options” link at the top of the results page. Whereas before if you wanted to search from a certain time frame, or make other refinements to the search, you had to go to the Advanced Search options page, now you can do a lot of those refinements right from your original results page.

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Just over a year ago, Google made some changes in their algorithm that appeared to be giving weight to “brands.” Now, “brand” is a short word that’s loaded with a lot of meaning. When this change took place, there were plenty of people running around in circles waving their arms in the air thinking that the big, rich corporations were going to dominate the search engine rankings and the whole purpose of organic search would be lost forever (the purpose being bringing users relevant results that could be from anyone, anywhere if they were right on target).

Fortunately, the passage of time has let people make some more considered analyses of that change. To get up to speed, let’s take a quick look at some of the ancient history (dating back to 2003) in search engine technology.

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