Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
- Survey Says: Google Sitemaps Gets Credit For Faster Indexing
About a week ago, we ran a poll asking Who's To Credit For Faster Indexing? The options included Google Sitemaps or FeedBurner, due to the topic we were discussing. The results are now in and the majority said, Google Sitemaps, in this case, gets the credit for increasing the indexing speed of these sites in Google. Here are the results of the 80+ responses: :: Google Sitemaps speeds up indexing said 49 respondents or 60.49% - Google Showing Longer Descriptions For Longer Queries
There have been more recent reports of Google showing longer descriptions (aka snippets) in the search results. We have reports from ThatsSEO.com, Holistic Search and SEMVironment.com with examples and screen captures. I was able to reproduce it for a search on fill empty cells with specific value openoffice. A typical search shows a two line description or snippet: But with the query above, you can get a three line description or snippet: Or four line - How Did Tele Atlas Improve Google Maps?
Maps Guide Adam created a new thread in the new Google Maps Help discussion forum clarifying how Google's Tele Atlas maps distribution deal has helped improve Google Maps. The two main points Adam made were: (1) You can see blocks of addresses, notice in the embed map below around Baruch College, that there are numbers on the streets that show you the house numbers. So if you need to go to 153 East 25th street, - Google Starts Cutting Projects, Employees & Offices
Seems like the economy is getting to everyone, including the all mighty and recession proof Google. In summary, Google has begun cutting out services they provide, they have cut 100 recruiters (i.e. less hiring) and they are closing offices, which might lead to 70 engineers losing their jobs. Danny has a great article summing up the Google product and services slashes, which include Google dropping Google Video uploads, Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Jaiku and - Does Google's Supplemental Index Still Concern You?
August 1st of 2007, Google dropped the supplemental tag from their search results. The main reason why they did this was because their supplemental index was fresher and deeper then it was when it first launched in 2003, plus, in my opinion, to reduce all the confusion is caused. Google said back then: The current system provides deeper and more continuous indexing. Additionally, we are indexing URLs with more parameters and are continuing to place - Did Google SMS Search Die Again?
Just last week, we reported major issues with Google SMS not returning search results. It was fixed about two days later. But now I am seeing more reports of Google SMS issues, so I decided to try it out myself. I sent three SMS messages to Google and now it is 10 minutes later, and still not a single response. Here is a picture: Google has confirmed issues with specifically requesting sport scores from Google
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Google crawls and indexes Archive.org, WebmasterWorld
- Ask.com Partners With NASCAR, Says “Super Verticals” Will Put It Back In Search Race, Sphinn
- Determining Factors of Digg's Front Page Stories, Sphinn
- How do I resume a suspended campaign?, Google AdWords Help
- Large document won't download as PDF anymore, Google Docs Help
- Tip # 14: Traffic But No Sales? How to turn traffic into conversions, Google AdWords Help
- You’re Up A Link Creek Without An Anchor, Sphinn
