I’ve just noticed Google has integrated ‘Google Suggests’ into their search box. Apparently they did this a couple of weeks ago but i just spotted it, (sorry i’m a bit slow on this one!). http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/local-flavor-for-google-suggest.html

For those that don’t know what Google Suggests does it is a tool that offers suggestions as you type into the search box with the number of results appearing on the right. It is really useful for search term research for SEO.

However, now it is integrated into the search box will this affect current search term research? People will think less about what they have to type and rely more on Google’s suggestions. Will mean sites need to optimise for less terms but the terms they do optimise for will be far more competitive as everyone will be optimising the same terms.

Have to keep an eye on the analytics to see if the longer tail terms start to drop off for traffic flow.

Google Local (the Google map displayed in the results for specific searches) has made a few changes resently. Previously the Local result would appear for specific geographic search terms, such as hotels in London now they are appearing for generic terms apparently based on IP targeting.

The thing that is annoying me is everytime one has appeared it hasn’t been relevant to my search (so Google are going backwards on making the search results more relevant) and the ‘location’ is always showing ‘London’ results, which is probably because my ISP has their IP set up in London which will be the case with most users having IP addresses in different locations to where they live. Basically resulting in the Local results be irrelevant to my search as i live 60 miles from London!

It’s also annoying me for a work related reason – I have been working on Weatherseal for Double Glazing. They have been hovering around 5th or 6th for a while now (from 15th a few months ago) but now Google have added the local results to position 4 of the results for Double Glazing they are a lot lower down in the page, drastically affecting click through rates.

Hopefully Google will see the error of their ways and either remove the Local results for generic terms or implement a better system for geo-targeting the results.

A friend of mine told me something really interesting over a pint last night and I thought it sounded so impressive i’ll let you guys in on a little secret! Just remember where you heard it first!

He told me that he is working on developing a new search engine which is very close to release that uses social media sites within their algorithm. The project has been kept top secret until they can get the rankings and engine working correctly but they are now happy with it and ready to make an official announcement pretty soon

He told me it was codenamed ‘sloof’ but won’t tell me the official name and it will have web spiders specifically designed to crawl social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Digg. The spiders will look for site mentions and number of links, as well as positive sentiment and number of comments made around a website. The search engine will then use other, on-site algorithms, (assumed to be similar to current search engines) to distinguish keyword relevance and use semantics to create relevance within the results.

This sounds like quite an exciting search engine and I look forward to hearing more about it. I going to hound him to see if i can have a play with it before it goes live, but he’s not giving too much away!

UPDATE

OK now the day is over i can reveal this is an April Fools, although i think the search engine idea is a really good one! Feel free to build it and send some credit my way!