Ever since the inception of Electronic mail (e-mail), the internet world has flourished and only moved further ahead; and now we have ‘The Wave’ by Google. Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. It’s a very potent open sourced tool where in people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Lars Rasmussen, a member of Google’s technical staff, based in the Sydney office, and with his brother Jens, is co-founder of the Google Wave effort. These brothers are also the think-tank behind the critically acclaimed Google Maps. Let me cater to a couple of rudimentary questions that may crop up in one’s mind.

• What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

• What does a wave primarily do?

It ends the long existing divide between different types of communication viz. email versus chat, or conversations versus documents. This means we can now indulge in instant chats, shoot e-mails, transfer images and documents, organize and collaboratively edit images and other documents etc. There’s a lot more to it than you and I can imagine.

It’s a single communications model which spans all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth consistency.

It’s a communications system that takes advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms.

Google Wave boasts some amazing features to make your instant messaging a lot more effervescent. It facilitates live transmission from the server to the browser with real time character display. Gone are the days when you would wait an eternity seeing ‘ABC is typing…’ with no text on display; and if you suck at spelling then there’s a state-of-the-art spell checker for your assistance!!

Attaching files simply means you have to drag and drop your required files from the desktop to the browser with no unnecessary clicks.

What’s amazing is that there is still a lot more to it!!  With a whole bunch of embedded API’s, Google Wave makes the web dance to its tunes. ‘Bloggy’ is one such interface wherein, changes made to the actual wave can be directly replicated on the blog site and vice versa. ‘Rozy’ is another sly interface which acts as a medium of real time translation between two users trying to chat in two different languages.

A single wave can be viewed and edited by many participants. If a new participant is added to an existing wave, he or she can simply hit ‘Playback’ to view the order in which the wave shaped up. ‘Playback’ is an exciting feature which lets all the participants keep a track on the entire evolution of a particular wave.

Google Wave is time and time again referred to as an HTML 5 application by its developers and has got the potential to create wonders in the World Wide Web. Google also foresees other network providers coming up with their own versions of a wave sometime in the near future. Even though Google Wave is in a very rudimentary stage, it is certainly here to stay and could soon make e-mails and other online clients turn obsolete.

Google seems to be continuing their UI changing spree. It seems that the Google India homepage is now showing the fade in effect first reported by TechCrunch for the Google.com homepage. Here is a screenshot of the Google India homepage when you land on it :

Google India Homepage - no elements

And when you move your mouse, rest of the elements fade in, and it looks very very cool

Google India Homepage - elements fade in

Strangely, the elements do not fade in if you start typing your search query. Only when you move your mouse do the elements become visible

This was not seen before on the Google India homepage till now. Do not be disheartened if you do not see this homepage. It is highly plausible that this is being shown to a limited set of users – keep your fingers crossed!!

One of the latest developments in Google organic search has been the way they now use the feature ’show more results from’. Google has removed the HTML link to a specific site command feature. Unlike before, Google now dynamically opens up multiple other results on the same organic search engine results page. Additional results, enabled by the AJAX driven plus sign are displayed along with the results from the web. This has brought a new dimension to the search engine optimization and the field of seo optimization.
Once clicked, the plus sign opens up in the form of five new links, and turns into a minus sign. This feature has turned out to be very effective in terms of google organic search as well. You can hide these additional links by clicking on the minus sign which will turn back to plus sign. The links that open up on the click of the plus sign are all contextual to the main search topic. This feature allows Google to accommodate multiple contextual search results within the same organic search results page and also makes it easier for the user to decide and access the additional results. We are yet to see if this is helpful to improve search engine rankings or affects the traffic of a website from an SEO perspective.

Google seems to be on the verge of doing something big. The reason for saying this is that we’ve seen a lot of activity concerning Google. We saw the launch of Google Wave (for developers only, yet) and Google released ‘Caffeine’ for developers and public to test it out. Google also shifted the sponsored links column a bit to the left and there seems to be a lot of testing with the Google SERP itself with dropdowns and what not. Today, I noticed that using Chrome you can directly search Google from the address bar (a la Launchy).

As seen below if you start typing Google in the bar, it suggests that you press tab to search Google

And when you press tab it gives you suggestions on what to do:

So, when you start typing in your keyword, Chrome gives you the option of seeing pages in your recent histroy related to that keyword

What Next?

Right now, Google lets you search some sites directly from the SERP (search for Flickr), so the only thing I can think of, for this handy addition, is when you start typing flickr in the address bar you press tab and then you can search Flickr !

Also this works only in Chrome……………for now.

Microsoft recently launched a new search engine by the name “BING”. It is said to be an up gradation of the live search which Microsoft had earlier. It has gained a lot of popularity since its launch and has been compared to “Google”. But there are a few things that I experienced while using both the search engines and would like to share them with you’ll:

Starting with Bing, must say that it is better than Live search. It has a great user environment as compared to Google. It has a simple white background, which makes it more appealing. As far as search goes, Bing categorizes search results as Videos, News etc. and displays these options as a part of the left navigation, which helps users to directly jump on the desired category result for which search query was made. It tries to include almost all features that Google has, like image search and videos etc. the video search is more fun as the video actually starts playing when you hover your mouse over it. Technically speaking, it has a very good design and a great combination of plug-ins and modules put together – All in all a great user experience.

But I still feel that Google is much better than Bing. The reason being, Google provides more search results as compared to Bing, in fact more than double. Bing includes spell check, where it rectifies the spelling mistakes without user confirmation, where as Google asks the user for confirmation. Speaking from a brand perspective, Google is a much trusted brand than any other search engine. Only a Google logo or a “result provided by Google” tag makes it more trusted by the user. Google has been in this industry for a long time and people trust Google for everything, as said by some – “if you have any doubt, ask Google”.

Bing is a good search engine with lots of potential which would probably grow with time, and could be said, a very good step forward by Microsoft in the search market.

Google’s old keyword suggestion drop down box design -

Original Google keyword suggestion dropdown box

Google’s new keyword suggestion drop down box design -

Another example of A/B testing .

Domain popularity is one of the highly valued factors that help search engines to assess the importance of your website in comparison with the other websites in a particular field. Greater the number of domains that link to your website, greater the domain popularity. Domain popularity will help you increase your website’s ranking in search results and also increase your website’s PageRank in Google.

Whenever a search is made through the search engines, all the relevant results are listed on the search results page. These results are presented to the user in an organized fashion based on the importance of the website as per the assessment of the search engine. The role of the search engines is to provide the most relevant information to the users from the most authoritative sources. Search engines decide the authoritativeness of a website from its domain popularity. Very often, it is the domain popularity that makes or breaks your search engine ranking.

Google uses domain popularity as one of the most important factor to assign PageRank to your website. As you can clearly see, domain popularity is highly important for your website’s online success. At times, domain popularity would be the only differentiating factor that will set you apart from your competitor.

Google image search has now started showing Sponsored links at the top of the results page. This is still in the testing phase and these results are currently being shown only to a few users when they are signed in to their Google Accounts.

In 2007, Google had announced that they were losing out on as much as $200 million per year because they were not monetizing their Image Search pages. Today, though, a line of three “Sponsored Links” is showing.

Sponsored Links on Google Image Search

Why Google hasn’t done this earlier is a question worth asking.

Internet users, across the world consider Google the last word in the search arena and attribute a demi-God status to it. However, on Saturday(Jan 31) Google showed it’s human. A malware update resulted in losses of around $1.5 million and that too in only 40 minutes. So what went wrong?

As part of Google’s malware blocking system, if it detects any site containing malware, then Google warns the user that the particular site may contain malware and routes the user to a page which says “Do you really want to go to this site ?”. On Saturday morning, Google was displaying malware warnings alongside every site listed and because of this users were routed to the warning page, irrespective of the site having malware or not. So for 40 minutes users could not access  any sites from Google. Organic SERPs and PPC results were affected due to this.  Tech Crunch, was amongst the first to report this error. The screen shot captured by them(shown below) clearly shows what was wrong in the SERPS.

Google Malware

Google Blog explains what went wrong.

“What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.”

Google earns about $2.4 million an hour (total revenue), however since Saturday morning Pacific Time is a bit quieter, Google must not have lost that much. However, because of malware warnings people might have clicked more on PPC ads thus resulting in higher revenue. Google has definitely taken a hit, just that its difficult to find the exact amount. Also, since SERPS were down individual sites must have lost out on traffic and potential conversions. I know quite a few search engine marketers must be fuming because of this, its all part of the game, guys. Yahoo and MSN did enjoy this though as people started using their search engines. However since this error was only for 40 minutes, their happiness was short lived.”

Did your sites show a drop in traffic?  Were your conversions down? PPC traffic showed a surge??

Let me know!!