Google has revolutionized the Internet in many ways and shopping is just one of them. The easiest thing to do when you want to buy something is to search that product on Google. That will allow you to view reviews of the product, compare prices from different stores and make the best choice.

By Pandia Guest Writer James Lander

Google uses two strategies to help users save money:

1. Google AdWords – Google’s online advertising program.

2. Google search – The Google search engine.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords was conceived as a program that would allow companies to insert their own ads and keywords when promoting their products and have their ads displayed only when a user searches for one of the mentioned keywords. This would ensure that the ads actually reach an audience that is interested in the promoted product not just the people that reach a page by mistake.

This is considered a much better method than forced advertising, which relies on inserting an ad on as many sites, and pages as possible, hoping a user would eventually click on it.

Google ads may also appear on web sites who have signed up with Google’s AdSense program. Google will analyse the content of the relevant web pages and try and deliver ads that are relevant to that content.

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This week Google started rolling outGoogle Search Plus Your World, which — besides being the worst case of bad branding in a long time — will cause Google a lot of problems. Searchers will go elsewhere and governments will complain. Here is why.

The idea behind Google Search Plus Your World (let’s call it +World, shall we?) is good.

Personalized and social search

Google has presented personalized search results for a long time, using data from your Google GMail account (if you have one) and your web history. Google has been using these data to build you a kind of personality or interest profile, making it easier for them to deliver search results that are of interest to you personally.

If you are a computer geek, searches for “apple” are therefore more likely to bring up results on the computer company, rather than the fruit or the music company of the Beatles.

Google has also tried to enrich search results with real time data frome the social web. For at time it did, for instance, include twitter messages (tweets), which devlivered information about what is happening right now. This was definitely a good idea.

+World is an attempt to combine the two and add personalized social data to the search engine results. That should be a recipe for success. Instead we believe Google is facing a PR disaster. You see, the implementation of +World is bad, very bad.

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Here are the latest news from the world of search engines and Internet searching.

Google Fails To Trounce Bing (Again): The Fallacy Of The Superior Search Engine Revisited
SE Land: Time to revisit the question – is there really a big quality difference between Google and Bing? Over the past 12 months, many things in search have changed… The results are the same as last year – a statistical dead heat; meaning overwhelming parity between the engines.

IBM Assigns Over 200 Patents to Google
SE Watch: According to a blog post by Bill Slawski at SEO By the Sea that references US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) filings, IBM has agreed to give Google 188 granted patents and another 29 pending patent applications.

Headslinger
P Bradley: A new way to discover and read the day’s news This is another news curation system which pulls out major headlines for you from various different resources – think of it as a self selecting collection of RSS feeds and you won’t be that far wrong.

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Here are some of the posts and articles from the search engine marketing field we have found interesting lately.

Why Great Content Doesn’t Guarantee You Links
SEJ: When it comes to content creation the most important concept to grasp is the fact that it is an asset. Just like a rental property or some stocks and shares, your content has the potential to generate cold hard currency.

Consumers Still Don’t Know What to Do with QR Codes
Marketing Pilgrim: A new study from Chadwick Martin Bailey shows that people are scanning, but they don’t know what do with the results.

Should computers have their own websites?
New Scientist: Stephen Wolfram, creator of “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha, suggests that “.data” should join the likes of .com, .org and .net as a new top-level domain (TLD) for organisations to share data in a standard from, creating a “data web” that would run in parallel with the ordinary web.

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The latest news and reflections from the world of social networking.

The Pandia site gets a new name
Some of you might have noticed that we have changed the full name of Pandia from Pandia Search Central to Pandia Search & Social.

There is one simple reason for this: It is no longer possible to keep the worlds of search engines and social media apart, a fact that has been reflected in our posts for a long time. The name change only reflects this.

7 Social Media Myths That You Should Bury Deep In The Ground
1stwebdesigner: SSocial Media is huge today and each week we see lots of new headlines about companies developing their own platforms, Facebook having even more visitors, or Paris Hilton’s account being hijacked on Twitter. These things happen more often nowadays especially because social media is part of our lives and some of us could not imagine their life without it.

Reddit Sees 2x Growth In 2011, Now Serving 2 Billion Pageviews A Month
Marketing Land: The most popular social news community, Reddit, hit record numbers in December. The site served over 2 billion pageviews last month, up from 1 billion in February of 2011.

Tools for online collaboration and collaborative learning.
Susanne of Pandia has gathered some essential online collaboration tools over at Delicious. See also her stack on open learning resources.

Time to Take Out the Social Media Trash
Marketing Pilgrim: Companies create multiple accounts to split out brands or for a specific marketing campaign and since hosting the accounts is free, why not? Here’s why not.

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Why is local search considered so important, given the fact that local search drives only a small fraction of the entire traffic?

Why do you hear small businesses spending a good amount of resources on optimizing their online store for local searches, instead of attracting a varied global audience?

By Pandia Guest Writer Lior Levin

The catch is: local search traffic is considered the most effective, when you are talking about conversions, sales of products and recurring benefits.

To give you a data centric example: 10 Local hits are considered more superior than 500 global hits, because statistics shows that out of the meager 10 local hits, 3 or 4 people will actually buy something from your physical store.

While there is no guarantee that out of the 500 global hits that your website receives every single day, a single person will ever visit your physical store in his entire life.

So it actually doesn’t even matter if your website gets millions of hits from Japan, when your physical store is in New York.

There are basically two main goals of local search engine optimization

• Ranking for the keywords and phrases used by “local” customers. It is important to know and focus the keywords used by actual users, not the jargon used in your industry.
• Gauging the competition of important keyword phrases and finding the reasons why your competitors are ranking while you are left behind.

I would assume that you are familiar with Google Places and have registered your business listing there. If you haven’t created your Google Places listing yet, better do it now. Its free!

Here are some tips which will help you get ahead of the competition in local search results:

Provide Something Exclusive

If your business is facing a lot of competition from other local small businesses, this is the right time to rethink your business strategy and take your business to a new dimension. You have to provide something extraordinary, something exclusive and something very unique which your competitors don’t have or provide.

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Did you know that some employees spend up to two hours per day searching for information in intranets and enterprise search tools? Or that as many as on in three of these searches are unsuccessful? As a result 40 % use the wrong information and 63 % make critical deceptions without being informed.

These numbers are from the report The Digital Workplace by Stephan Schillerwein from Infocentric Research, a consulting, software and research company from Switzerland. The report was presented by Schillerwein at the Online Information Conference in London earlier this month.

Reasons for search problems in the enterprise

In addition to the disturbing numbers above, the report concludes they there is a productivity loss in information work of a whooping 25 %. So search in the workplace seems to be broken and it causes serious problems.

What are the reasons for these problems? One obvious cause, reported by Martin White of Intranet Focus at the same conference, is that most businesses have no enterprise search system at all. Really.

One reason stated by informants among decision makers in these enterprises is that “people mostly remember where they put their files”. These same people do not think that it is important for colleagues to have access to each other’s information. So in many cases, search simply is not a priority.

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Some interesting articles and post from the world of web search and search engines.

Google Buys Clever Sense: An Answer To Siri?
SE Land: As is being widely reported Google has bought startup Clever Sense, which earlier this year launched the local-mobile recommendations app Alfred. Alfred is like “Pandora for the real world” and was dedicated to creating a comprehensive “interest graph.”

The Simpsons: In The Future, Google Enslaves Half The World (But Lisa Still Likes It)
SE Land: Google gets a mention in The Simpsons, future Google, that is. Google has enslaved half the world, apparently, but as Lisa Simpson puts it, it’s still a damn fine search engine.

Topsy Labs Announces Realtime Social Search Engine for Mobile Devices
Yahoo! Finance: Topsy Labs released a beta mobile search experience today, m.topsy.com, that enables you to quickly find the most relevant, up-to-date communication about any topic or keyword, using social data from Twitter and Google+.

Google Drops Scholar From Navigation Bar
SE Roundtable: There are complaints in the Google Web Search Help forums that Google has removed the Google Scholar option from the main drop down navigation menu.

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