Pandia Search Engine News Wrap-up June 19

Here are some essential search engine news headlines from this week.

Google Test Adds Website Names, Subtracts URLs in Search Results
SE Watch: Google appears to be testing a new look for search results, adding the name of popular websites including LinkedIn, Facebook, Apple, Wikipedia, Amazon.com, Yahoo, and Bing next to the page’s URL. In some cases, Google replaces the URL entirely.

Google Launches Indexed Local Directory Portals
David Mihm: Google has just released city-specific business directories that are clearly going to compete with Yelp, Citysearch, and all the other IYPs in terms of highlighting popular local businesses.

Google’s Chromebooks Arrive in Stores
Mashable: Devices from Acer and Samsung are currently available via Best Buy and Amazon.com in the U.S. and at various on-line retailers in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. The Chromebooks run Chrome OS and are optimized for the web.

Wendy Boswell: Google has begun rolling out a long awaited for improvement to their Image Search, and they’re calling it “Search By Image”; basically, this is a search where you begin with an image and find out where it originated, what it’s actually capturing, who might have taken the image, etc.

SE Roundtable: Inside Facebook reports on recent data from their gold reporting service that Facebook has lost 6 million users from their U.S. base.

Amazon Reviews, Yahoo Answers Showing in Bing Quick Previews Box
SE Watch: Bing seems to have recently made some changes to its Quick Previews box, inserting reviews from Amazon.com and answers from Yahoo Answers when users mouseover the arrow to the right of the search result to get more information about a website.

Bing Releases Slew of New Mobile Features for iOS, Snubs Android
SE Watch: Among the new features:

A “split view” in Bing Maps that lets you view the map and relevant data (directions, local businesses, etc.) simultaneously.
Search history and trending topic suggestions during search.
The option to “Like” an image from Bing Image search, local business details, or an iOS app.
An automatic app discovery tool in mobile search when using an iOS device. This service automatically surfaces Apple app content based on popularity and grants users to reach the install page directly from the mobile SERP.

Google Adds Desktop Voice & Image Search
SE Journal: We’re getting much closer to Star Trek technology; users can simply tell Google what they want to search for and get results.

Google Renames My Maps To My Places & More
SE Roundtable: The new features and design changes include:
Items are organized by date with your most recent activity at the top
Filters make it simple to sort and view only your maps, starred locations or rated places
Create and share personalized My Maps through the “Create new map” link.
Drop-down arrow next to each location in your list, you can easily delete any of your saved maps, stars or Google Places ratings.
These personalization changes will automatically be synchronized across all other Google properties including Google Places, Google Maps, and Google Maps for mobile.

Google’s New “Me on the Web” Feature

Spotify, Gearing Up for U.S. Launch, Closes Its $1 Billion Round
AllThingsD: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek can use some of that cash to support a planned U.S. launch this summer. He now has U.S. licensing deals with three of the four huge music labels and is in advanced speaks with holdout Warner Music Group.

Google Maps API Allows Street View in Grand Theft Auto’s Liberty City
SE Watch: The Grand Theft Auto community, and especially GTA4.net, have been hard at work in building an advanced map of the fictional Liberty City since 2008. As a city meant to mirror current-day New York City, Liberty City is an expansive and complex landscape.

Disturbing Michelle Obama Image Makes A Case For Facial Recognition In Google’s New Image Search
SE Land: Do you remember that disturbing, Photoshopped image of First Lady Michelle Obama that made huge news a couple years ago? … But if you upload the right pic (or wrong photo, as the case may be) of Michelle Obama into Google’s new Search By Image tool, that disturbing image shows up front and center among Google’s search results.

Google Testing New Design Without I’m Feeling Lucky Button
SE Land: A reader emailed us a screen shot of the Google home page missing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button as well as a new look for the inside search result pages.

Highlights From Google Inside Search 2: Instant Pages and Search By Image Chrome Extension
Google Tutor: Google has also released a Chrome extension that makes the searching by images process quicker. It adds an option to the right-click and you can use it on any image on the web.

See also the latest search engine marketing news wrap-up!

source : www.pandia.com

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