Google Hotpot

Google launched a recommendation tool called Hotpot that lets people share with their friends information about shops, restaurants, bars, theaters and other places in their life.

“We’re making local search results for places on Google more personal, relevant and trustworthy,” product manager Lior Ron said in a blog post. “When you rate places you like, we’ll tell you about other related places you’ll love.”

Social media Marketing

Social media Marketing is the art of bridging the communication gap with your consumers. Writing compelling content and using different tools can speed up your process of getting more fans following on the social media networking sites but, is this marketing technique helping you in gaining the desired credibility level in the market?

If your audience feels that whatever you said is not credible, it won’t really matter how well you said it, your motive will not be fulfilled. Most of the small businesses find it difficult to get a credible position in the market. A small fan base to support the brand via word of mouth or no brand recognition will make the small business owner feel that the efforts made are simply a waste. Don’t sell; Educate!

Microsoft will be saying good-bye to MSNBot1.1 that will be replaced by the next bot: 2.0B. The team has said that new development will enable Bing to gather better information from a bigger number of websites that Microsoft indexes across the globe.

Recently, AOL has launched a new search toolbar which is available for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Flock browsers as of now. The toolbar would easily catch your eye as it is dark blue and sort of recedes into the browser. It will help users link to their favorite AOL products, such as AOL Classifieds, AOL Yellow Pages and Reference Center. Besides, it also allows users to search the web very quickly.
Here’s a screenshot of the toolbar:

Matt Cutts put the effort to answer the question that was asked off late about the position of keywords in the URL and how does it impact ranking at Google through a video According to Matt, even though keywords in the URL help to a certain extent, but one should not get caught up in the exercise!

The video also shows Barry Schwartz seeking the answer from Matt Cutts as whether people should include keywords to the URLs of already existing sites! In reply, the latter said, instead of considering change in existing URLs, people should consider this aspect when creating a new site!

The Internet Explorer team came up with Internet Explorer 8, which is geared up with a very useful feature called Live Search Accelerators. The Accelerators are likely to make web surfing much faster and easier!

After Zimra founder Satish Dharmaraj marking his exit from Yahoo!, another executive to resign from the search engine is Marco Boerries. The top mobile executive has already announced his resignation

Boerries wrote in an email,“With a very heavy heart I have to tell you, that I will be leaving Yahoo!.” He cited personal reasons for the departure. Boerries spent four years as Yahoo!’s top mobile executive. He was named the 16th most powerful person in the wireless industry by FierceWireless in the year 2008.

According to the report of Hitwise Data (PDF FILE), a majority (almost 50 percent) search queries are at least three words long, and more than a third are four words long or even longer than that.

Based on the report, it can be said that today, most Internet users are extending their search queries in different search engines. Have a look at the following table, which will give you a deeper insight regarding the same:

In the table, it is shown that 1- and 2- word queries are becoming less common, and 4, 5, up to 8 words queries are becoming more common.

Three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are all fighting duplicate content. In an effort to clean up duplicacy of content, they are implementing a new HTML tag – “ .” It is a Canonical Tag, which will allow all the web publishers to remove duplicate pages from their websites.

Nathan Buggia, a lead program manager at Microsoft said, “We are happy that everyone is going to support the same implementation.” He further added, “This is a clear benefit for publishers as it gives them an opportunity to get more exposure through search engines.”

Yes, you read it right! Microsoft is giving perks even during recession.

Microsoft’s SearchPerks program has been running a three-day incentive in order to encourage participants to do more searches on Live Search. It has started on January 21, and running through January 23, which is offering double tickets for every search with a maximum of 50 tickets available that can be earned each day.

Below is the snapshot of the email through which SearchPerks is notifying members about the incentive offer: