Google Suggest, a new form of search engine reputation management (SERM) issue has created a new form of entertainment….in which the creator is the victim!!!

Please find below the TOP 10 funniest Google suggestions about itself:

Google won't Search for Chuck Norris

1. Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris he finds you
2. Google hates Bambi
3. Google is not God
4. Google is rubbish
5. Google is running everything
6. Google is lame
7. Google killed Bambi
8. Google doesn’t remember me
9. Google says sorry
10. Google has gone too far

Let me know if you find some more

This monday Google unveiled Fast Flip. Fast Flip is th new way of viewing the Google News results page. 

This innovation  will show you all the news pages relevant to a subject in a graphic version, more or less like Google Image results page. When you click on one page, you can read it like a newspaper and switch to the next results page via some links on the side. It is sort of like a news paper about one subject.

Fast Flip - Google

This new way of viewing the news is very impressive and easy to use.

The only bad thing about it is the limited number of sources available (although the BBC, FT and many others can be published on Google). We still don’t have all the sources like in the actual Google News.

Good innovations, but needs to cover more media…

Few months after the launch of Jewish search engine Koogle (see my post about Koogle Search Engine),  ImHalal has shown-up. This new search engine has been deisgned with the Muslim community in mind, with specific filters on the search results. This filter makes sure that the result is acceptable to be view ed by a Muslim. For example the keyword ‘beer’ will return a warning message.

Muslim Search Engine

It is the second religious search engine in least that 3 months and proves that people are always looking for community specific tools online. Also this search engine solves a few legal issues for countries like India, South Arabia, ect.

On the technologies side of it, this search engine proposes some interesting results and seem to be pretty relevant.

It is a pretty good job done by ImHalal.

An Australian company is selling Facebook friends, Twitter followers and Digg votes for a price close to 20 cents each.

 Obviously this offer is for companies who want to promote their Facebook page or Twitter page or syndicate their content via Digg because today these social media websites are a very powerful marketing tool.

 
To be honest it is a pretty good idea, but why it is so important to have a large number of friends, followers or votes?

If you are a media agency working for a client, the number of Facebook and Twitter friends/followers can be one of the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and obviously more you have the better it is.

 
From a users point of view, a Facebook group or Twitter account with a lot of friends/followers is more attractive and will rank higher on Facebook internal search engine as well as Google.

 
A number of votes on Digg allows your subject (with a nice link to your website) to be on the home page (or main category pages) and will attract large number of user scurious to know why so many people ‘digg’ it.

It is sad but true that on social media websites everybody is a sheep who follows the mass… but it is also the fault to Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/Google who promote more the most viewed, top follower accounts.

 
I think that this company have developed a good business and will have lot of confidential clients pretty soon…

Two days ago Yahoo! unveiled its updated search options. Firstly, there is the new option bar on the left side of your search results page.  This left menu option offers you the possibility of looking for one specific source only.  The sites proposed by Yahoo will vary based upon the keyword you use.  For example when you are looking for a person, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter will show up, but when you are looking for ‘how to’,  the sites  ehow, and YouTube  will show up.   It is a pretty good idea which facilitates searching.

Yahoo! New left Menu

The other innovation from the Yahoo! search team is the search history.  When you‘re looking for different keywords relevant to one topic Yahoo! can differentiate between two meanings for the same word.  For example, Yahoo! will understand that Jaguar is a car company and not an animal.

All these improvement are very good and quite user friendly, but I am not sure why they are doing all this work when we know that Bing is going to take over. Also, I cannot find any of these new options on Yahoo!. Maybe it is not online yet or I am not smart enough to find it.

Google is not a big player on social media, different projects have been attempted but have never really succeeded. Its rival Microsoft owns part of Facebook and Twitter doesn’t want to sell.

Instead of starting from scratch, Google has used its iGoogle. A pretty good idea considering over ten million of people use iGoogle. Google announced the Social Gadget for iGoogle last friday.

iGoogle Social Media Application

The principal is simple; on your iGoogle page you can include some applications that you can share with your friends. These applications include games, to do list, pictures sharing …

The concept is pretty nice; it is a good and cheap way to develop a social media platform. Maybe Google will even take some social media market shares.

This idea also shows that people want to have everything in one place – search engine, game, chat, on one screen.

Lets see how well this social initiative will work out for Google.

Today Google revealed its new search engine algorithm, Google Caffeine. This new version of Google is being trialled online.

This new version doesn’t make any changes to the Google results page presentation. Based on the Google Webmaster official blog, the new algorithm is faster, able to crawl more, and takes in consideration the reputation of the website in question.

After few tries with different queries, the new search engine is definitely faster (0.20s instead of 0.40s) but for a normal user I cannot see the difference (0.2s is difficult to notice). The result is very similar to the ‘old’ Google, it was very hard to see any change. Most of the changes are on the universal search or on the new crawled pages which used to rank high.

From a users point of view this new algorithm is not a revolution, from a technical point of view this is maybe the beginning of a new era as it is the first time that the notion of reputation is part of an algorithm.

I think that a lot of websites which don’t respect Google rules are penalised (link buying, black hat techniques…)

Now let’s see if Google is going to add some major changes to its Google caffeine.