SEO & Search Engine Optimisation Company News

With their upcoming Android Nexus Jelly Bean on the way, Google are reportedly making major changes to how their Android phones will be delivered; offering multiple mobile device makers early access to Jelly Bean in order for them to sell directly to customers.

With previous devices Google would only work with one hardware maker at a time in order to produce ‘lead devices’, which would then be sold to consumers through wireless carriers or retailers.

This new expansion into a more direct sales is likely to cut out the influence of these wireless carriers and retailers, as Google will be able to exert more control over key features and apps. Currently third parties are able to block access to apps in order to force customers into using their own branded apps, and they can also lock customers into long contracts. By circumventing the influence of wireless carriers Google hope to make their service more user friendly, making it easier to change network as well as speeding up the acquisition and availability of new apps.

The current practice of selling through wireless networks and retailers is a kind of third party selling that reduces some of Google’s profit as retailers either syphon off some of the revenue for themselves or instead raise the prices for customers. A direct sales approach will help Google lower their prices, making them more competitive with major smartphone rivals Apple Inc.

These changes are also aimed towards calming the cries of companies who build apps with the Android, many of whom have expressed concerns following Google’s recent acquisition of Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.

Many smartphone, tablet and app manufacturers have been worried that Google would try to prioritise the business of Motorola to other manufacturer’s expense. Google could favour Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc by giving them access to the latest updates, putting them technologically ahead of the market and leaving the rest lagging behind. By opening Jelly Bean access to more manufacturers Google hope to prove that there is more space to compete regardless of Motorola’s likely advantage.

Selling Androids without contracts could potentially cost customers extra fees however when they come to joining their wireless networks. As customers will have to buy their phone and contract separately they could have to pay and extra US$150 to US$200 for activation.

Jelly Bean is set to be ready for release next autumn; we will have to wait until then to see how customers take to Google’s new approach to selling.

The renowned sales director Bruce Daisley has joined UK Twitter’s sales team, having left his post at Google-owned web video site Youtube. Reports suggest that Daisley was headhunted by the ever growing social network.

Twitter usually makes money by allowing sponsored tweets in user tweet feeds. With this new appointment there are bound to be some changes in how the company makes money.

Twitter has consistently grown over the 5 years it has been operating. Now more than 140 million tweets are being published daily. The micro-blogging site has famously influenced politics; the farce surrounding public figures and super-injunctions is a key example. Companies, celebrities and everyday people with something to say define the site; a space where one user can tell the world, a company or their favourite celebrity what they think. Will this extra focus on profit mean that it becomes less of a political influence? Will the site lose its edge as one of the most user led news network sites?

The influence of the social network is evident as careers are made and sustained by the direct interaction between people. Lady GaGa currently stands with over 24 million followers but she is by no means the most popular user on Twitter.

Currently Twitter allows companies and users to approach each other in order to make money. Users choose TwittADs to have in their feeds. TwittADs make money for the users if their followers click on them. In this way Twitter creates revenue for users as well as advertisers.

With Daisley’s appointment Twitter will be finding new ways to make money. At the moment Twitter make their money through promoted Trends and pages. Last year Sky was one of the first companies to pay to advertise on UK Twitter. This means some of the trends emerging will have been started by businesses rather than by an independent idea fed by user interest.

Daisley’s influence will appear on Twitter in time. This could mean that Twitter becomes noticeably less user made and more like Youtube in the level of corporate manipulation. Corporate manipulation isn’t a full stop for user/company relations as corporate culture will need to be creative and active in order to make the most of the potential that Twitter has.

Because, after earning $1.14 billion last year, Mark Zuckerberg apparently felt that Facebook wasn’t making enough money and so has introduced a ‘pay to promote’ feature for user posts.

The feature is being tried out on customers in New Zealand apparently in order to “gauge people’s interests in this method of sharing with their friends.”

The feature will mean users will have the option of paying a fee if they want their opinions to be more visible to their friends. Currently the costs range from 25p all the way up to £1.25 meaning that, amidst the ever growing miasma information being thrown up on user’s Newsfeeds as they gain more friends.

With Facebook’s imminent stock market floatation as well as an unnerving slow down in revenue over the first quarter of the year, Facebook are clearly searching for new avenues to make money and give confidence to potential share holders.

Ian Maude, internet analyst, stresses that these are part of ongoing experiments in improving the way users share information over social media; some of the developments will be free but others will incur costs. As Facebook has grown so rapidly that inevitably the tools for posting and sharing information need constant updating and these test could be the next phase in the culture of social media.

What impact this will have on the consumers is unclear. Could charging to make posts more popular leave regular users languishing with unread posts and might popularity in the future come down more to how much you can spend on you posts than how interestingly you can use Facebook. There is also the risk that these changes don’t change anything much for users, so long as information can still be exchanged and posts can still be shared between real friends (as opposed to the legion of Facebook acquaintances nobody knows) then users may not bother paying.

Groups who the developments could affect however are those who promote services or products on social media. More and more companies now are using Facebook profiles as a tool for free advertising, as well as musicians and artists who have found Facebook to be an invaluable source of self promotion. So a ‘pay to promote’ function could aim towards these users with an interest towards reaching as many people as possible and therefore sort purely sociable users from promoters.

With Facebook’s reputation taking steady damage thanks to a public perception of greed and information hoarding, introducing a ‘pay to promote’ function could seem cynical and corporate.

We will have to wait and see what these tests will ultimately lead to. But it may highlight a trend developing towards users themselves being charged for the pleasure of their social media.

Third party browser companies Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox have both blasted Microsoft’s announcement that their ARM version of Windows 8 would only allow Internet Explorer, their own branded browser, to run in ‘desktop mode’ on their operating system.

Representatives from Internet Explorer’s two biggest rivals have denounced Microsoft’s actions as a horrendous step back for competitiveness in the market and unjustly reducing customer choice. Representative for Mozilla Firefox, Harvey Anderson has said that if Windows RT only allows Internet Explorer perform that functions of modern web browsers then third party competitors will be “effectively excluded from the platform.”

This move by Microsoft to forcibly remove their rivals from competing on Windows RT has been seen by some to be a fairly desperate ploy to claw back market position following a drop in popularity. Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome have increasingly been seen as cooler and more efficient replacements to the older fashioned Internet Explorer so rather than struggling against their powerful contenders, Microsoft have been able to develop Windows RT that will simply cut them out.

This could have a seriously negative impact on consumer choice. Regardless of how effective a service Internet Explorer can provide, competition is one the lifeblood of business. Competition has lead Google and Mozilla to develop innovations in technology and design to appeal to customers, but if Microsoft can safely force Internet Explorer on customers then they won’t need to innovate to appeal and services could potentially languish.

The reason for this concern that Internet Explorer could have an unfair advantage lies in the problem that the ‘Metro Style’ applications, which are the most modern features of browsing online, will only have access to a very limited subset of APIs on the Windows RT version of Windows 8. It will lack the function to run virtual sandboxes that Mozilla and Google claim are needed to run some browser optimisations like just -in- time compilers.

Browsers running exclusively with Metro won’t be able to access the APIs they need to keep up to date with other modern browsers and will therefore be unable to compete on Windows RT. Seeing as Windows RT is likely to be used by millions, if not billions of customers, this will put Mozilla and Google at a serious disadvantage.

Microsoft will be able to defend themselves with the fact that their primary rival Apple, have similarly restricted access to third party web browsers. On their platforms for tablets and phones Apple only allow customers to use their own Safari internet browser.

It seems unlikely that Windows will make RT more competitive for third party browsers. How customers will respond to the developments may dictate the success of Internet Explorer and Windows RT.

Social network Myspace has come to an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US regarding the sharing of user information with advertisers, following a privacy investigation undertaken by the agency.

The settlement means the social network will submit to mandatory privacy audits for the next 20 years, a result of an investigation into whether Myspace was selling user information to advertisers, an act that was in clear breach of the site’s own terms of use.

When users sign up to Myspace, after filling out a form requesting personal information such as full name, age and gender, they are issued with a ‘Friend ID’ that tracked their movements within the site. The privacy policy for the site stated that no user information would be shared with third parties without seeking the explicit permission of individual users.

However, the FTC claimed that Myspace breached those terms by sharing the Friend IDs of thousands of users that visited certain pages on the site with advertisers. With the Friend IDs, the FTC argued that advertisers would be able to access personal information for these users, which would then allow them to track user activity on other sites across the internet.

Social network Facebook is already subjected to the same auditing process following charges of unfair or deceptive practices from the FTC, as is search giant Google, after the agency accused it of using its position as search engine of choice for the majority of web users to influence online advertising.

These rulings show that the FTC is cracking down on user data abuse by online organisations. While the charges come under US law, web users around the globe can expect to see significant action over privacy policy breaches in the future.

Google are racing for the prize of smartphone dominance as a recent US survey by analysts comScore indicates that they are visited by 96.9% of all smartphone users.

Beating off competitors, especially giant competitor Facebook, the survey shows that Google are heads and shoulders ahead of the competition. Behind Google’s 97 million users was Facebook’s 78 million, Yahoo!’s 66 million, Amazon 44 million and Wikimedia’s (including the main Wikipedia site) 39 million.

In app usage on Google fell down to second place though. This is unsurprising however considering they were second behind iTunes in the iPhone survey and Android Market in the Android survey. So Google are still maintaining a universally strong position, in the Android app survey Google apps actually hold three of the top four positions as Android users gravitate towards Google Search, Google Maps and Gmail.

Managing director at theEword Daniel Nolan pointed out that this is dominance is particularly impressive seeing as, although Google’s enormous presence online would mean a large share is expected. However, thanks to their android operating system these new figures demonstrate that Google are surpassing even their suspected potential, demonstrating the power and popularity of their search engine that users are trusting it on every platform.

This is particularly good news for Google who can boast of a secure position in a still rapidly expanding market. Following Google’s overpowering of the search engine market many companies would surely have been hoping take advantage of the rise in smartphone internet to find a new avenue to compete, it would seem that Google have maintained their position though.

In terms of social media the report indicates that, although not as popular overall as Google, Facebook are still ahead of their main rivals. Compared to Facebook’s 78,002 visitors Twitter only have 25,593 and Linkedin have 7,624 and in regards to the time spent visiting Facebook per customer is also far ahead of their rivals. Noticeably Google’s own foray into social media, Google+ didn’t appear on the social media survey, there was also the appearance of the fast growing social media: Pinterest, who’s 7,493 visitors is close to Linkedin. This demonstrates the remarkable growth of Pinterest and indicates what could be a very bright future for the company.

The survey has presented a broad result that indicates the intense competition for the smartphone market, the winners, the losers as well as highlighting potentially the next big social media service, Pinterest.

In efforts to compete against e-commerce giants Amazon, Walmart and eBay are developing new, faster operating search engines.

eBay, who have been operating on a 2.0 version of their search engine known a ‘Voyager’ are preparing to make the mega leap to 3.0, hoping to bring their technology closer to the capabilities of Amazon.

The world of e-commerce has grown with amazing rapidity over the past few years, in the US spending online grew by 13% to a whopping $US161.5 billion by the end of last year according to online business analyst comScore. In this highly expanding, highly lucrative market speed is everything and so an effective on page search engine is essential to direct customers effectively to products. If customers can’t find what they want within a couple of clicks they will look elsewhere.

Amazon have grown to dominate the world of internet retail thanks to their fast, efficient and intuitive search capabilities. Amazon have been able to efficiently present the customer with a range of information they might be interested in quickly, and then track their progress in order to offer them more product options that might tempt them.

eBay and Walmart are hoping to compete with those capabilities and wrestle more customers away. Over the past few years eBay have gone on a hiring drive tripling the numbers of employees dedicated to working on search engines to more than 150 as well as hiring the expertise of highly respected engineers Ken Moss and Hugh Williams.

eBay’s new search engine will be called Cassini, is has been designed to trawl full product descriptions as opposed to just their names, whilst also taking into account the purchasing history of the customer. Therefore eBay hope their search engine will be more tailored towards customer needs, for example understanding HP to mean ‘Hewlett-Packard’ instead of ‘horse power’.

As well as retaining customers thanks to their improved search engines against competitors like Amazon. eBay and Walmart are also hoping that improved search engines could help their product search engines compete against the even larger goliaths of the online world; Google.

Currently Google control a huge percentage of the search engine market and concentrate heavily on providing useful product searches. When a customer searches for a product Google will not only present general information from the web, but direct them specifically towards product pages and company adverts that could help. From the point of view of Walmart however Google searches provide customers with a variety of information, including Walmart’s competitors. Therefore it is in the interest of retailers to attract customers solely towards the search functions of their own websites that ensure every product will be their own.

The announcements of heavily updated search engines from eBay and Walmart proves the competitiveness of the online retail industry and represents that the race for the most customer efficient technology is heading to another level.

Bing have introduced a major overhaul in how they present their search results to de-clutter their service and appeal to new more customers.

Bing was launched in 2009 by Microsoft intended as being the hottest alternative meant to compete against the dominance of Google, but subsequently failed to make the impact they had hoped. These redesigns are a dramatic “de-cluttering” of Bing’s presentation of search results based on years of consumer research that hopes to attract more customers away from Google.

The re-design is largely a simplification of search results as well as a function that changes the layout of those results to make them best suit a consumer’s specific search term. The layout of icons has been minimalised to avoid needless clutter and highlight valuable information, allowing increased ease of use tailored towards how consumers want to see their results.

Adaptable search results presentation is hoped to be a major improvement in Bing’s service. After extensive consumer research, Bing are trying to understand what’s relevant to their user searches. Therefore when a user searches for ‘bacteria’ Bing will give them the Wiki first and concentrate less on images, but if they search for ‘Mona Lisa’ Bing will prioritise images to try and satisfy what customers need.

Microsoft also promise that the recent updates have considerably sped up search times for Bing. Meaning that customers will enjoy faster page- load times and a generally better service. Although slightly faster loading might not seem as thrilling as a re-design, in the world of the internet customers demand the fastest access and any minor delay drives them away. Regardless of design, page load times could be one major factor channeling traffic towards and away from different search engines.

Ultimately the question will be whether these changes will manage to wrestle customers away from Google and what would that imply for the rest of the internet.

Google have a remarkable market domination, but that same dominating aspect has been harming their public image over the last few years, so Bing could still take advantage of seeming like a cooler alternative.

Certainly a re-design of the website means extra publicity for the site, making your site news worthy spawns a plethora of news sources that people will read and get them thinking about Bing. This article is proof of that.

If Bing do manage to gnaw away some more chunks of Google’s revenues then this might impact on the internet as a whole, making varying search engines more competitive and potentially changing the relationship websites have with their search engine rankings.

Following the recent High Court ruling that filesharing website Pirate Bay was infringing on copyright laws, major internet service providers have been ordered to actively block access to the site.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the body that represents the UK music industry, sought the ruling that British Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should block customer access to Pirate Bay to help fight copyright infringement.

UK companies Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media have all been ordered, by the decree of Mr Justice Arnold, to make Pirate Bay inaccessible to customers within the next few weeks. BT have also been told block Pirate Bay but have had a request for extra time granted before they make the changes.

Swedish website Pirate Bay have become the latest in a series of file sharing services to suffer from a blocking order, six months after BT was forced to prevent their customers using Usenet indexing site Newzbin2. Pirate Bay claim to be the largest service of their type with over 3.7 million British subscribers, generating $3 million in advertising in October of 2011 and being ranked as one of the hundred most popular websites in the world.

Although Pirate Bay have argued that they don’t directly supply music files, instead acting as a sort of search engine for free music, that they are not doing anything wrong. Mr Justice Arnold in the High Court however ruled that Pirate Bay were guilty as they “actively encourage [copyright infringement] and treat any attempts to prevent it (judicial or otherwise) with contempt.”

BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor has welcomed the news that he believes will help prevent nefarious websites from taking advantage of the music industry without paying any money. He claims that the damage done by file sharing website is extreme as it undermines the British music industry and even threatens jobs of those who create music.

Others disagree with this however, or at least argue that forcibly blocking access to certain websites is the wrong way of tackling the problems of copyright infringement. Jim Killock of the Open Rights group warns that banning access to websites is akin to internet censorship, and that once it becomes acceptable to ban some offensive sites it risks starting a trend where more and more material is censored.

Virgin Media spokesman has said that, although Virgin Media will comply with the ruling, they don’t believe blocking Pirate Bay presents an effective long term solution. They believe that it is consumer habits need to be changed because so long as there is a demand for free music websites will find ways of appearing and finding new ways of providing it, simply leading to ever more costly court processes. They urge only way of tackling copyright infringement is by presenting viable alternatives for customers, offering genuinely value for money services that consumers will want to use.

Until that alternative is found however it would seem that the continuing rigmarole of the music industry banning free fileshare services will continue.

Search company Google is set to launch a price comparison service in the UK that will enable users to search for and compare credit cards and other financial services.

Google bought UK-based comparison website BeatThatQuote.com last year for a reported £37.7 million, with managing director John Paleomylites becoming product management director at Google following the takeover.

In a statement sent to TechWeekEurope, Paleomylites said: “Today we are introducing a new look comparison unit with enhanced transparency using BeatThatQuote.com expertise and Google technology. The enhanced service is now easier to use for consumers and will provide higher quality traffic for advertisers. We will introduce this improved design layout for searches around credit cards, current and savings accounts in the UK.”

Google already has a comparison service for consumer goods, allowing users to compare the price of a host of goods across a wide range of websites.

The web giant faces increasing accusations from competitors, however, with claims the company is abusing its position as search engine of choice for internet users around the world being levelled at it from Microsoft and a host of rival websites. The accusations have even prompted an investigation by the European Commission.

The launch of this new service seems set to provoke even more finger-pointing and questions regarding Google’s impartiality. Will the price comparison service automatically rank higher than competitors like Comparethemarket.com, Gocompare.com and Moneysupermarket.com? Google has pledged to be transparent about its relationships with the companies who services and products are listed and will include companies that have not explicitly signed up in the search results.

Naturally competing companies are not happy but only time will tell if Google’s new service will provide real competition for these heavily advertised sites.