Category Archives: Google

Google and Vertical Search

Google is actively looking for sales people to fill out their recent vertical search positions in NYC. Verticals include Travel, Finance, Local, Healthcare, Entertainment and much more.

Of course, the jobs descriptions don’t give much information about these verticals but they give us an idea of what Google is willing to do. For example, many positions like this one – a position for a Travel Vertical Manager – remind us that Google wants to expand their “offline” offers:

  • Develop client relationships with offline decision makers.
  • Develop and pitch client proposals for offline opportunities.
  • Sign up clients for offline initiatives.
  • Represent industry-level performance and issues to Vertical Director & offline product teams.
  • Drive best practice sharing across vertical to sell offline campaigns.
  • Work closely with Vertical Industry Marketing Manager on effective packaging and research strategies to develop sales collateral.
  • Train Direct Sales and Inside Sales Organization sellers on offline opportunities.

Tip of the hat: Brian Smith from Comparison Engines

Google Maps vs. Windows Live Local

This post provides a nice comparison of Google Maps and Windows Live Local. The author compared, for the same address, different views: standard, plain view, and detail (3D view), and he explains that he prefers Windows Live Local for detailed maps and Google for standard views.

I agree with the author, the “Bird’s eye” view option provided by Windows Live allows you to have a very detailed view of a location, something that’s not available with Google Maps. This option is only available for a few cities such as San Francisco and New York.

Google and bad neighborhood links

Vanessa Fox posted an interesting blog post on the Google SiteMaps blog. The post followed Search Engine Watch Live Seattle and she wanted to use this blog to share two of the questions the Google team received during the event.

In the post, she notes that links from “bad neighborhood” sites cannot hurt a site’s rankings, but it won’t help at all. On the other side, she confirms that outgoing links to bad neighborhood and spam sites can hurt one’s site rankings:

“In general, linking to web spammers and “bad neighborhoods” can harm your site’s indexing and ranking. And while links from these sites won’t harm your site, they won’t help your indexing or ranking. Only natural links add value and are helpful for indexing and ranking your site.”

Google Notebook already live?

It seems like Google Notebook will be officially launched today. Garret Rogers reported yesterday that he found the Google Notebook login page but he wasn’t able to login yet.

It tried to log in this morning with my Google Account and it worked:

It’s simple and it looks good. I know they are a bunch of similar applications online but this one seems to be the easiest way to take quick notes online.

Google’s Web Office is (almost) there

Well, you all heard that Google officially anounced the release of its Calendar application today.

Richard MacManus posted a nice chart on his ZDNet’s blog comparing Google’s applications with all the elements included in a Web office suite, and it clearly shows that Google’s rapidly progressing.

Today, it seems like Google would only need a Spreadsheet program (such as MS Excel, or OpenOffice Calc), a Presentation application (i.e. Powerpoint) and a Database application (Access) to provide a complete Web Office suite.

Just wait a few months and Google will just know more about you.

IBM: Google’s rival for Business Search Technology?

Thanks to Bill Slawski’s posts, I’ve been aware of a few search engine technology related patents published by IBM and also about some really good articles on SEO published on their official website.

The intent of these patents and of these articles aren’t really clear. We know that IBM has been involved in search engine technology, this page gathers all kind of articles regarding IBM and its relation with search engine technology.

More recently, IBM announced that they have been chosen by The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) to develop and online clinical trials portal, that allows patients and physicians to easily find “medical information from more than 88,000 pages of ongoing and completed clinical trial studies worldwide, allowing users to search in German, French, Japanese and Spanish, as well as English.”

The search technology developed by IBM seems very advanced, and uses techniques that no other traditional Internet based search engine is currently using:

The portal uses IBM’s advanced text analytics and content discovery capabilities, extending beyond conventional Internet-based search to help interpret and understand the medical information an individual wants and needs — even if their query contains misspelled words or jargon. For example, patients are sometimes unfamiliar with medical terminology, so the system suggests synonyms for medical conditions and medicines, which helps to correct misspelled words.

IBM’s vision could be to develop search technology for companies that have specific goals and unique requirements. Google also developed products to help businesses search their information, but it doesn’t seem to be something revolutionary.

From what I understand, if a company’s using Google Mini or any other Enterprise products, it’s just a search engine with shallow functions.

On the other side, IBM’s example with their technology that allows multi-criteria search, text analysis, vertical search etc, seems to be able to provide advanced search technology to businesses that need to be very efficient and find the right information.