Healthy Blog Reviews

OneUpWeb recently released the results of an eye-tracking study on Google’s new real-time results integrated into SERPs—and it looks like the search giant might have just wasted $15M (the estimated cost of Google’s deal with Twitter ). The study segmented web users into two groups: consumers and information foragers. It took consumers 7.09 seconds to look at the real-time results, even though they’re listed just below the news results and before the organic results. In fact, they scrolled below the fold to view the image results before they fixated on the real-time area, the eleventh area they focused on. Information foragers took slightly longer to turn to the real-time results: 7.39 seconds. It was the thirteen area their eyes focused on—but the first 12 areas were all just above the real-time results in the news results. (The search task here was to research a selected current news item using the search engine of choice—for 89% of all participants, that was Google.) (Side note: I’m not sure why the times in the above graph are so much higher than the numbers OneUpWeb also provided that I used in these paragraphs.) The second search task was segmented by group—the consumers were to look for a product they were considering to buy for themselves or for someone else as a gift. Information foragers were to again look for information on a current news topic. Interestingly, in this second set, consumers were five seconds faster than information foragers to focus on real-time results. Meanwhile, 20% of consumers and 30% of information foragers actually clicked on real-time results, as opposed to 69% of consumers and 60% of information foragers that clicked on the top 5 results excluding real-time. I’ve long argued that real-time results will only be helpful for a very small, select set of data—and for that set, most people would know to go to Twitter or Facebook in the first place anyway. I’m not the only one. The Guardian’s Charles Arthur points to several others who feel the same way, most notably Nick Carr , who sardonically chronicles the efforts to organize the web’s information around 140-character ephemera. And yet Google insists that this information is useful and must be foisted upon the user. Aruther quotes Marissa Mayer last summer: We think the real-time search is incredibly important, and the real-time data that’s coming online can be super-useful in terms of finding out whether – something like, is this conference today any good? Is it warmer in San Francisco than it is in Silicon Valley? You can actually look at tweets and see those types of patterns emerge, so there’s a lot of useful information about real-time interactions that we think ultimately will really affect search. Apparently users don’t quite agree yet. What do you think? Are real-time results useful?

Tags: Charles Arthur, cloud-hosting, facebook, image, organic, real, Research, search-engine, Silicon Valley, study-on-google, user
Posted March 10, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Last week, Chinese officials reported that Google was in talks about their threats to leave the country (or only partially ) if they’re forced to continue censoring search results. Also, Chinese officials reported that Google was not in talks with the government. Google CEO Eric Schmidt declined to comment on the state of negotiations a conference in the United Arab Emirates today. However, he did say that “we’re in active negotiations with the Chinese government, and there is no specific timetable,” although he promised “Something will happen soon.” Google announced a hacking attempt targeted at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists in January. They suspected that the attack may have originated in the Chinese government on some level, and announced they would no longer agree to censor search results. However, nothing has changed—yet. Soon after Google’s statement, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented on the matter, urging China to review the breach as well. This prompted suspicion that Google’s withdrawal threats were directed by the US government. Schmidt denied that today: “The Google action was not in any way advanced or coordinated with the U.S. government except post-facto,” he said in response to questions. “Google’s discussions are with the Chinese government, and they do not involve the U.S. government. The U.S. government’s doing its thing unrelated to Google.” Schmidt’s statement is pretty open-ended: “something” and “soon.” What kind of timeline do you think we’re looking at—and what do you think the end result will be?

Tags: China, chinese, clinton, country, government, hacking-attempt, legal, Search, secretary, state, state-hillary, thing-unrelated, think-the-end, united, united-arab
Posted March 10, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Rome wasn’t built in a day. A journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step. If you’re going through hell, keep going. It’s always the darkest before the dawn. Whatever the cliché being thrown around in Redmond, it must be working, because Bing’s US search share continues to nudge ever upwards. According to comScore’s data , Bing climbed from 11.3% to 11.5% , likely stealing that share from the “we’ve given up on search” Yahoo, which dropped from 17% to 16.8%. The only kink in Microsoft’s plan to catch Google? Google’s share increased too–up from 65.4% to 65.5%.

Tags: before-the-dawn, clich, darkest, darkest-before, going-through, Microsoft, Research, thousand-miles
Posted March 10, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Lots of cool Twitter statistics coming out of Barracuda Networks new study (pdf). Where do I start? 21% of Twitter users are actually using the service–meaning that have at least 10 followers, follow at least 10 people, and have tweeted at least 10 times. 74% of Twitter users have less than 10 followers! However, that number is improving with a 30% increase in the number of users with 10+ followers (since June 2009) 60% of Twitter users follow less than 10 people 34% of Twitter users have more followers than others they are following, showing an 70% increase from 20% in June 2009 73% of users have less than 10 tweets, as compared to 79% in June 2009. 49% of Twitter users joined between November 2008 and April 2009–the period when many celebrities jumped on the Twitter bandwagon Twitter’s growth spiked at 21% in April 2009 Lastly, who tweets the most? Those with around 1,000 followers do: I’m guessing that’s the sweet spot of actually being able to engage and keep-up with your followers. ( via )

Tags: actually-being, follow-at-least, followers, growth-spiked, more-followers, Social, tweets-the-most, Twitter, twitter-bird
Posted March 10, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Have you heard of the Streisand effect ? Long story short , in 2003 Barbra Streisand sued a photographer for $50 million because he took photos of her home. She said the photographs invaded her privacy. Unfortunately for her, the rest of the world had no clue of the existence of these photographs until after she filed the lawsuit. Filing the lawsuit created a greater issue than if she had just kept quiet. Enter Lindsay Lohan. The almost popular, but now notsomuch, actress is suing E-Trade for, get this, $100 million for naming one of its TV babies “Lindsay.” Apparently, Miss Lohan believes that she has obtained “single name” status–like Madonna or Oprah–and that everyone that sees the milkaholic manboy-stealer will instantly think of her–and that will ruin her stellar reputation . Says Lohan’s lawyer: “They used the name Lindsay,” Ovadia said. “They’re using her name as a parody of her life. Why didn’t they use the name Susan? This is a subliminal message. Everybody’s talking about it and saying it’s Lindsay Lohan.” Ovadia wants an injunction to force the spot off the air, and the Lindsay camp wants every last copy of the commercial Actually, no one was talking about Lindsay Lohan, until this lawsuit. Oh wait, maybe that’s the point. No one was talking about you, so file a $100M lawsuit and get everyone talking about you again! Alternatively, why not actually make a movie that we think is good?

Tags: commercial, existence, force-the-spot, lawsuit, Lindsay, lindsay-lohan, photographs, reputation, used-the-name
Posted March 10, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media