Google’s version of real-time search was unveiled today, where ‘live’ search results are displayed via AJAX on the search results page.
At first glance, it’s a pretty nice execution, blending real-time with relevance, rather than just real-time, which is the focus of all new social/real-time search engines.
Google has officially announced new ad formats for AdWords.
We have recently seen Ad Sitelinks (which are working very nicely, thanks) released in Australia, and Local Business Extensions have been running for a while, but there are some new ad formats on the way as well.
Ad Sitelinks
Video ads
These look designed for the likes of 20th Century Fox to enable playing of movie trailers directly in the search results. This makes a whole lot of sense for movie releases – our “traditional” campaigns would run across search, the content network and YouTube to get users to play the trailer. Doing this in the search results directly should massively improve efficiencies.
New Google Video Ad format
ICANN has just opened registrations for non-Latin-character domain names, which will mean websites in Japanese, Chinese and Arabic etc will be able to use domains in their own language.
In Japan it’s common to see TV and Press ads that feature a search box call-to-action as the transliterated domain name in Latin characters is too hard to remember. From next year, these sites will be able to have domains using characters native speakers can easily remember.
Having keywords in the URL is an important part of the natural search ranking process. Having your domain name featuring your main keywords will certainly boost rankings. Read more
Yahoo! has thrown in the towel and entered into an agreement with Microsoft to use Bing as the search engine across all Yahoo sites, whilst being the paid search sales force for Bing.
Read more
Google’s quarterly profit was ahead (slightly) of Wall St expectations with revenue growth of 3%. Unless you have Google shares, that’s not so interesting, but in the official announcement, there were some interesting points.
Clicks for sponsored links increased 15% year-on-year for Q2 (there was 17% growth in Q10.
The CPC decreased 13% year on year, but was up 5% compared to Q1.
This is very much in line with what we are seeing for our own clients, but there are big variations between sectors. Finance and Automotive in particular are still well down on the same time last year, but we are seeing similar levels in travel.
Bing Tweets is a new (beta) tool “fusing Twitter Trends and Bing Insights”.
There are trending topics on Twitter in a tag cloud – click on a link to see filtered tweets and Bing search results. What’s great about this is you can see what people are saying about in real time, check out the latest news results (if applicable) and see what the official search results have to say.
In addition to the trends topics, which are divided in tabs (popular now, people, places, products), you can also do a search. This is great for research – tweets and search results side by side.
Bing Tweets
If this is the kind of innovation we are going to see from Bing, bring it on.
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