The Google Beat presents this week’s most popular search queries.

Search has become the most important way of finding news and information. All that search data gives you a wealth of information of what is on people’s mind right now.

Needless to say both marketers, policy makers and intelligence analysts have understood that this wealth of search information can be used to understand social, cultural and economic trends.

We already have a search intelligence portal over at Pandia Search Trends , which gives you access to online sources for search trend information.

Google has now launched a separate YouTube channel called The Google Beat, which presents the latest search trends in a weather channel kind of way: quick paced and with a map!

We are still experimenting with the new design of our search engine news wrap-up column, trying to turn it into an even more informative microblog. Here are this week’s headlines.

3 Free Online Alternatives to Google Calendar
If you start looking for good web based Google calendar alternatives that are free, you won’t find a lot of them. (Google Tutor)

The Google Beat: New Vlog to Showcase Google’s Hottest Search Trends
Every week the videos on Google Beat will talk about what is bringing users to the search engine using data compiled from Google Insights for Search, Google Trends and other tools so now you can finally know if you and the millions of other Googlers are all wondering the same things. (SE Journal)

How Google May Rank Blogs
Interested in finding a blog about a particular topic or place, rather than individual blog posts? A recent change with Google’s blog search is intended to make it easier to do so. It now adds a list of “related blogs” at the top of the blog search result page. (SEO by the Sea)

Google Public Data Explorer Lets You Visualize Public Datasets
Google Public Data Explorer, a part of Google Labs experiments, is a tool that helps you explore through and visualize public datasets that are made available by government and other agencies that track stats, from around the world. (Google Tutor)

Yahoo! Search Serves Suggestions Closer to You
Yahoo Search Blog introduces an enhanced Yahoo! Search Assist, providing suggestions geographically closer to you as you type your query.

iTunes Ping Has No Zing
Marketing Pilgrim is not impressed about the new social network

New Oxford English Dictionary may be online only
Talk of foregoing print edition of OED (TechCrunch)

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By knowing more about SEO parameters, websites can effectively be designed to be found by the three major search engines. Website performance is directly affected by how easy it is for users to find the site, so here’s some information on the most common SEO parameters used by search engines today.

By Guest Writer James Mowery

Domain

Search engines take into consideration the domain type and the age of the domain name when ranking websites. Also, the inclusion of keywords in the URL and the amount of times the URL has changed hands affects ranking.

Website Content

Search engines can recognize the amount of pages a website has, whether or not the content of the pages is unique, and the amount of keywords on each page.

Keyword placement on websites is one of the biggest factors of SEO. For the best results, keywords should be placed in page titles, meta tags, anchor text, alt tags, and within the text of the pages. Other words that are synonymous with the keywords should also be used to avoid over-saturating the site with repetitive text. The website’s readability should be taken into consideration, as well.

Linking

Search engines place a great deal of importance on the amount of outbound links and back-linking a website has. Sites with outbound links and back-links to and from unique, high quality websites rank higher in web searches. Linking up with other websites that share the same keywords can greatly improve search engine recognition.

Optimizing a website for search engine recognition can be done privately, but this may not be the most efficient way to get your website noticed. Companies specialize in SEO strategies and know how to draw traffic to websites by appealing to the different SEO parameters each major search engine uses.

About the author: James Mowery is a computer geek that writes about technology and related topics. To read more blog posts by him, go to led tv.

photo credit: Elsie esq.

Google has not let its recent setbacks (the closing of Google Wave comes to mind) stop it from launching new services.

Google wants to be more than your search central. It wants to be your communication hub, becoming your one-stop place for interaction with friends and colleagues. This is why it launched Google Buzz, a kind of Facebook/Twitter social web tool based on your Google email account, and this is why it now attacks VoIP phone service Skype by turning Gmail into a regular phone.

All you have to do is to install a voice and video chat plug-in, and you can use your computer’s microphone, loudspeaker and — if needed — video camera to communicate. And yes, a dedicated head set with mike is useful.

Now, Google’s voice and video chat has been around for a while, but its usefulness has been limited. You could only connect with others having a Gmail account. Now US users of Gmail can call anyone with a phone anywhere in the world.

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And then they were two…

This week the world lost another search engine giant. Yahoo! in the US and Canada has switched over to using the Bing database, and the rest of the world will soon follow. This means that the North American market is now totally dominated by Google and Bing.

This does not mean that Google and Microsoft have achieved global domination, though. Yandex is, for instance, the big player in Russia and Baidu is dominating the Chinese market.

Still, this does not bode well for search engine innovation in what we used to call the Western Hemisphere. There are no alternative big search engine players left in Europe any more.

Here are some other search engine headlines we have found interesting this week:

Google Adds A Filter For Finding Blogs SE Land
New Awesome Ways to Search within Current Site (Using Google’s site operator) SE Journal
Has Google Purged Places Of Yelp? All Signs Point To Yes TechCrunch
Google Realtime Search Gets Home Page, Conversation View, Alerts & Geosearch SE Land
Google News Changes Again, Adds Collapsible Right Side SE Roundtable
Bing’s Market Share Up 51% In Past 12 Months SE Land
Google’s Latest Buy – Like.com Confirmed! PageTraffic
Yahoo! Transitions Organic Search Back-End to Microsoft Platform Yahoo! switches over to Bing search results in the US and Canada.
Twitter hashtags: quick guide Phil Bradley
4 Cool New Gmail Features You Should Know Search mail and docs, sign into multiple accounts, and more; Google Tutor

Google has relaunched Google Replay as part of an improved real-time search feature.

Google Replay was Google’s attempt at presenting Twitter search results in a new fashion, giving you a time-line graph. By clicking on the time-line you could select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from one specific time period.

The service soon disappeared, but has now reappeared at a new Google Realtime Search page.

You can also find this microblog search tool by doing a regular Google search and then click on “More” and “Updates” in the left hand column of the search result page.

Resourceshelf reports that the “Updates” database contains content from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, and Google Buzz. Only Twitter is covered by the Replay tool, and then only back to February this year. The idea is to expand the historical Twitter database back to 2006.

You can narrow searches by clicking on the time-line (to select a month or a date) or by selecting “location” in the left hand column. A link to “Updates with Images” give you the same results with image thumbnails fetched from the blog or the page the microblog entries are linking to.

In the right hand column you will find links to the most popular web site links at the time of your search query.

Finally, Google may also add a link to the full conversation leading up to a tweet or update if possible.

Is this and important upgrade for Google?

We think so, as Twitter and other social web sites contain a lot of interesting references to online resources that will be of use to journalists, librarians, researchers and other investigators. Remember that Twitter & Co is much more than senseless chatter about making dinner and going to bed. People use this services to look for information, and by using Google Realtime you can tap into those searches.

Google Realtime can also be used to research trends and retrace the development of a particular happening, let’s say a natural disaster or a political scandal.

See also Google Tutor: Google Increases Focus On Realtime With Realtime Search Page

Here at Pandia, we have gathered tools and tips for all kinds of searching. We even have a page dedicated to shopping search which was recently updated, which will help you find quality shopping sites online.

Pandia Shopping Search has three parts. The first part is a list of shopping search engines and online malls. There are separate sections for comparison shopping, customer information, shopping trends and more.

The second part contains links to selected online stores in 16 categories. Find established online shopping sites for home & garden, food & drink, gifts & flowers and much more.

The third part is a collection of links to shopping sites listed in our own Pandia Plus Directory. This part contains links to some 40 categories each containing hand picked links to quality sites. Give it a try to find quality shopping web sites!

photo credit: jk+too

Social media of all kinds are a source of huge amounts of fresh information about news and events, likes and dislikes. But the signal-to-noice ratio is not good: Much, maybe most, of the material posted is personal and it can be hard to find the pertinent information. You need help to sift and sort the items, so why not try one of these five great real time search engines.

There are all kinds of search engines out there, searching the real time web. Some search a particular channel, like Twitter or Flickr. Others search for particular media, like images or video. These five search engines all search several sources and present results in several kinds of media.

Collecta

My personal favorite is Collecta. This is a powerful search tool, yet it is easy to figure out and navigate. The front page holds boxes, each containing a hot topic represented with both images and text, so you have a feeling of reading a real time newspaper.

When you do a search, the screen is split into three columns: The main column shows a live stream of fresh items matching your query. These are updated in real time and the stream can be paused if you want a closer look. The stream contains:

• Microblog updates from Twitter, Jaiku and Identica
• Blog posts and blog comments
• Photos from Flickr, TwitPic and yFrog
• Videos from YouTube and Ustream

When you select an item, it expands in the right column, where you can get a closer look at it. Unfortunately, there is no way to play videos on the results page, you have to click through to the source, e.g. YouTube.

In the left column, you can sort your results by type (updates, images, stories etc.). In the same menu, you can share the results: You can send them directly to Facebook, Twitter, Mixx, Delicious, Reddit or StumbleUpon or you can grab the URL to the page or the feed.

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