Category Archives: Google

LG To Install Google on Millions of Phones

Google just reached a deal with mobile manufacturer LG to pre-install its search engine and other services on millions of mobile phones.

“Selected LG handsets, pre-installed with Google products and services, will be shipped globally in the second quarter. They will offer one-click access to Google’s search engine as well as Google maps, Gmail and Blogger Mobile.”

This deal is similar to the one Google signed with Samsung in January.

With that kind of pact, Google’s market share in the mobile search arena is just going to increase even more.

Google Launches New Mobile Search Engine!

Google just launched its new mobile search engine in reply to Yahoo!’s OneSearch. If you go to the mobile version of Google, you’ll see this message:

This is what the new homepage looks like :

It’s just one search box. Users need to type in their query, and Google will automatically categorize them in “Web results”, “Images”, “News”, “Local results” etc.

For example, if I search for “britney”, Google will show images of the pop star first:

If the user searches information about a company and searches for a ticker, it will display this:

In this new version of Google, web results and mobile results are not separated, but mixed together. Google seems to be choosing which result (from their web index or their mobile index) to show depending on the search query.

This is what they say about this on their help page:

Google mobile web search can display different types of web sites:
– Webpages specifically designed for mobile devices will be displayed as is, and are identified by a phone icon.
– Webpages not specifically designed for mobile devices will be formatted by Google so that the pages will display on your mobile device. During this process, Google analyzes the original HTML code to get a sense for the page layout. In order to ensure that the highest quality and most useful web page is displayed on your mobile device, Google may alter images, text formatting and/or certain aspects of web page functionality to make it suitable for viewing on your device.

Users also have the ability to build their own mobile homepage, in order to add news, weather, Slashdot feeds etc:

It only took a few days for Google to reply to Yahoo! in the mobile search battle. We yet have to hear an announcement from Google to see if this is a beta version or not. I guess it’s now Google’s turn to compare itself against Yahoo! 🙂

UPDATE: A post has just been posted on the Official Google Blog to announce the new mobile search engine.

Google’s K-1 Report Reveals a Few Mobile Search Tidbits

Via John Battelle’s blog, I’ve learned that Google filled its K1-form this week. I wanted to see what Google had to say about Mobile Search in this report and found a few interesing tidbits.

Obviously, Google is underling the fact that mobile phones represents a fundamental development platform:

Mobile phones are a fundamental development platform for us. Many people around the world have their first experience of the internet—and Google—on their mobile phones. We have continued to invest in improving mobile search and have introduced applications that allow users to access search, email, maps, directions and satellite imagery through their mobile devices.

About “the first experience of internet on mobile phones”, this is one of the reasons why Google is trying to expand in third-world countries, where people have access to mobile phones but not to computers. For example, they are willing to buy Portugal Telecom in order to gain users in former five Portugese colonies such as Angola or Cape Verde.

Regarding mobile search ads, Google reports that they have been testing ad placements, but don’t really explain what they have planned for the future. I know that Google Adwords for mobile is live in the US, France, UK, and Germany but am not sure about other countries where it’s (or will be) available.

Medio Bigger Than Google in The US? I think so.

In this week’s Businessweek article about  Mobile Search, they mentionned a survey from M:Metrics that estimated the number of people using Google Mobile in the US to be 4.75 Million in the fourth quarter of 2006, while Yahoo! has around 3.6 million.

The article also cites Bryan Lent, CEO of the growing mobile search company Medio Systems, claiming that they have more users in the US than Google. It might be hard to believe but I think this is absolutely possible.

In the US, Medio is powering Verizon and T-Mobile. Verizon has 59.1 million users, and T-Mobile has 25 million, as of december 2006. That represents a potential user base of 84.1 million for Medio. If 10% of both mobile operators’s users (and I think I’m being pessimistic with this percentage) use search on their portal, that makes 8.41 million users for Medio in the US, that is, twice more users than Google Mobile.

Mobile giants plot secret rival to Google – Yeah right…

Do you remember the Telegraph article a few weeks back saying that some of the EU’s biggest telecom companies aimed to create a giant mobile search engine to challenge Google?

Europe’s biggest telecoms groups are aiming to create a mobile phone search engine that could challenge Yahoo! and Google, the US giants.

Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia and one American network, Cingular, are among the companies that will come together for secret, high-level talks at the mobile industry’s biggest annual trade show in Barcelona next week.

They were supposed to meet at 3GSM and talk about it but no announcement about this has been made. Either it was a really secret talk, or it was just a big rumor, as Ajit from Open Gardens rightly thinks. My current colleagues who have been working with mobile operators for years were saying that these guys weren’t really good at creating consortiums, so this kind of project was (or is) not likely to happen.
Anyway, the battle for mobile search is on, let’s see who will win…

No Title Tag On Your Page? Don’t Worry, Google Will Use Your Headers Instead

One of my colleagues today noticed something weird with a client’s website. Basically, because of a problem with their CMS, some of this french site’s pages do not have title tags. While my colleague was working on the website, she realized that in its index, Google displayed some text in the SERPS for what’s usually the title tag..

Let’s take this page as an example. As you can see, there’s no title tag. Now let’s look at the cached version of this page in Google :

The text displayed instead of the title tag is actually a header. Google is showing the first header that it found on the page. In our example, the first header in the source code is a h2 (note: there’s no h1 tag on the page) :

<div id=“lang”>
div>

<div id=“last_news”>

<h2>Dernière minute

I’ve checked other titleless pages from this site, and in the SERPS, Google always shows this h2 tag instead of the missing title tag. The first header tag is always this h2 tag containing the text “Dernière Minute”, or “Fresh News” in english. Unfortunately, the site didn’t make a clever use of Hx tags to structure their document, if they did, Google would have showed something relevant to users, but that’s not the case…

This is yet another example that respecting basic accessibility principles will be appreciated by Google and improve both your rankings and the user experience.
I tried to see if someone else came across the same case, and found this guy.

Research Beyond Google

Many people don’t really realize it, but only a small part of the world information is indexed in Google. Furthermore, people start realizing that some of the results displayed in the search engines’ results do not always satisfy them.

For those of you who want to go deeper when searching, the Online Education Database (OEDb) has gathered a list of 119 of specialty search engines to search Art, Businesses, Jobs, Politics, Science or Health information. The list includes useful and comprehensive resources that you might have used in the past but that you stopped using since Google came up.