By looking at the Google trends tool we can see that the weather is a popular topic when it is snowing in England.

The number of online searches about the weather has exploded these past two weeks. Never before has there been so many people looking at weather information online. For example, the BBC has five times the usual number of visitors to it’s weather section.

Unsurprisingly, every time that it is snowing the number of searches increase significantly. Good time to advertise on the weather websites…

Google Suggest - Universal Search

This Google update is pretty simple. When you are on the home page, Google will suggest some ideas for keywords and shows some universal results even before you have pressed enter.

This new update is only available for the .com and doesn’t work with Google UK. It is also very limited; just useful for the weather and some basic functions (conversion rate…). It is far from what I would call a ‘universal’ search… if you are looking for ‘Nike logo’ nothing shows up (same for ‘London map’ or ‘tiger wood news)’.

Google Suggest - Universal Search

Anyway this function has the possibility of expanding, and consequently being more useful, with more media integrated into it (map, news, football result, image, video…)

Right now this update is too limited and very few people will even see it. However, at least Google is trying to do something a little bit different from Bing or Yahoo

The new Google live search has finally appeared on the Google UK results page. It is just a little window with a continual feed of information. Most of the results are from Twitter and news websites.

Google UK Live Result - Tiger Woods

It is hard to say if this is a good initiative, obviously the quality of the links can be very poor because the content is judged the same way as a traditional website. You just need the keyword to be on your Tweet to be on this little window. I think that a lot of scam will happen with this new functionality as well.

Anyway, it is a new and interesting function that shows that Google can crawl extremely fast through a different number of sources, but in the long term I don’t see the additional value of it compare to the traditional Google news result

Gillette has been accused of changing the french website, specifically the animation with Thierry Henry, Roger Federer and Tiger Woods.

Gillette may have changed the Flash animation after the France – Ireland football game and the notorious Thierry Henry’s handball. On the french animation, Thierry Henry doesn’t have a ball on his left hand but in the other countries versions Thierry Henry carries one white football in this left hand.

Thierry Henry - Gillette French website

Thierry Henry - Gillette UK website

Why doesn’t Thierry Henry have a football when Roger Federer has a racket and Tiger Woods has a golf club on the french animation?

Hard to check if Gillette did anything or it is just a weird coincidence. Anyway, lets see how Gillette is going to manage this crisis…

Following my post on McDonald’s search engine reputation management and image issues, a similar issue has arisen with a personality: Michelle Obama.

When you are looking for ‘Michelle Obama’ on Google Images the first result is a picture of her looking like a monkey or ape. It is obviously a racist and offensive image.

Michelle Obama on Google Images

The official comment from Google is:

“Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it.”

This is the official answer to deter companies and individuals from complaining about every negative result relevant to their brands or name. Google has been sued many times and is always successful in these cases on the basis that they use an algorithm and the search results are not a choice.

In this case I am pretty sure that they will make an exception, I don’t see the White house doing a SERM campaign.

Anyway, this example once again illustrates how important is to manage your search engine reputation, not only the web result but all kind of result (image, video …).

A few months back, when there were still 24 X-factor contestants I predicted, based on Google search results, that the winner of the X Factor 2009 would be Danyl Johnson, followed by Stacey Solomon.

Today these two X Factor contestants are still part of the show, where only ten of them are left. So far my previous prediction has been proved right…but obviously since the month of September, a lot happened and there are many others new influences which will effect how the general public vote. Now lets see who the new X-factor winner should be based on the most recent Google searches.

If we look at the last 7 days (UK only) the 2009 X-Factor winner is the group John and Edward, but if you follow the show you know that they probably not going to win… so the proper X-factor winner would be Lloyd Daniels or Lucie Jones follows by Olly Murs and Jamie Archer.

X Factor Winner 2009 based on Google

Also based on this research the next contestants to be nominated will be Rachel Adedeji and Danyl Johnson.

Please find below the results:

1.       John and Edward
2.       Lloyd Daniels
2.       Lucie Jones
4.       Olly Murs
5.       Jamie Archer
6.       Joe Mcelderry
7.       Danyl Johnson
8.       Rachel Adedeji

After Google removed a penalty (on the Search ranking) from two different websites of Media Corp, the shares of Media Corp increase by 158%!

Effectively, Google penalised two websites of Media Corporations, gambling.com and creditcardexpert.co.uk for an undisclosed reason. Just after the announcement of Media Corp that the penalty was removed by the giant search engine the share increased significantly…153% in a week!

Google Result - Gambling.com

This shows you how powerful Google has become and also how important is to do SEO for a major company… if all the share holders know how many top companies don’t care about their visibility online, they would probably change some of their investments.