The Past Week In Google Search
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The past week wasn’t extremely eventful for Google. Despite that, we’re still going to look at what the search engine is working on, what the top searched terms of this week were and well, anything you might want to know about search and Google that happened in the week that’s about to end. First off we’d like to talk about Google Instant. The new search system was received with extremely positive feedback. Once upon a time you would type something into the search box, hit enter and only then get search results for your query. Ever since Google introduced Instant, things are a little different.
Nowadays you get to type something and you get results from the very first few letters. The search box will also display suggestions just so that you can find what you’re looking for faster. If you’re looking for weather forecast, you might just have to type “we” and you may already see what you’re interested in displayed right under. The only problem was that Instant was initially released only for Google.com. After that, the search engine giant added support for several other countries. Most users still remained stuck to Google.com awaiting the new search to be implemented for their local version of Google search. Recently, Google has announced that it has added Google Instant to 18 new domains across Europe and Asia. They now include : Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Finland, Hungary, Indonesia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Norway, Pakistan, the Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Sweden and Vietnam.
On top of that, Google has added local product availability in search. You may be shopping for carrots but you’ll probably not be interested in the ones found in Canada if you live in Europe. While people usually buy their products from local businesses and don’t spend as much time looking for online retailers, a higher number of shoppers would love to simply click what they want to buy and receive it at home. In any case, Google tried to make it easier for people to find local stores that are selling the products they are interested in. That was done by adding information on product availability to the google.com search engine. All you have to do is search for a product and then click a “nearby stores” label. You’ll get to find out which local stores have that product and if they have it in stock at that given time. So far the search engine giant has entered a partnership with over 70 retail brands including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma and more. Users will initially gain access to a 4 billion item database.
To further improve searching, your favorite search engine company chose to offer more relevant results from the same website. As Google points out: “Sometimes it turns out that one website is extremely likely to have the information you’re looking for, like when you’ve typed a website name as part of your search, or you’re looking for information from an official government office.” And just so that you can find that type of info easier, several changes were made to search a couple of months ago. They’ll show more results from a domain that offers useful information for users. Starting from this week, the feature will include even more queries and show up to four results from the same website.
Last but definitely not less important, Google Apps users will get ten times more applications than they did before. As Google explains, a large number of customers are starting to understand the benefits of Gmail, Google Doc and other Google Apps. Some of them were interested in using a whole range of Google services like Voice, Reader or AdWords straight through their Google Apps accounts. That’s why the company chose to add support for an insane number of services. You can find a complete list of them here.
Administrators will gain the ability to offer different sets of applications to different groups of users. For instance, a marketing team could benefit from Picasa Web Albums and share photos from customer events. Those photos could also be published through Blogger. To make things a bit more simple to understand for everyone, Google has grouped the apps together into several packs. First of, Google Apps is a free service that will benefit families, entrepreneurs and groups of up to 50 users.
Google Apps for Business, as its name suggests will be great for businesses, deliver 25GB of e-mail storage for each user, a 99 percent uptime guarantee, data migration capabilities, phone support, security features and advanced management tools for $50 per year for each user. Google Apps for Government is FISMA certified and was designed to suit the needs of local, state and federal agencies. Finally, Google Apps for Education offers a lot of features that the version for Business does, but at no cost to schools, universities and several non-profits that qualify. For more information on Google Apps, take a quick trip to the company’s blog right here where you’ll find useful links to everything regarding its services.
