Google improves Flash search and indexing

Google has enhanced its search engine's capacity to index Adobe's Flash files, which are very popular on the Web but tricky for search engine spiders.

Google's search engine can now index external content that a Flash file loads, such as text, HTML, XML or Flash content itself, the company said Friday.

The Google search engine will also tie the indexed Flash file to this externally loaded content and the documents from where it comes, Google said.

"This new capability improves search quality by allowing relevant content contained in external resources to appear in response to users' queries," wrote Google software engineer Janis Stipins in an official blog.

Friday's announcement is the latest in Google's multiyear effort to improve its indexing of Flash files and specifically builds on the announcement in June of last year that Google had developed a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files.

At the time, Adobe also announced it was providing optimized Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo to help with their ongoing efforts to better index Flash files.

Improvements to index Flash by Google, Yahoo and others benefit not only the search engines and their end users but also webmasters and designers, who have struggled to have the Flash portions of their sites indexed and made searchable.

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/308268/google_improves_flash_search_indexing

References:

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Flash indexing with external resource loading

Official Google Blog: Google learns to crawl Flash

Adobe - Adobe Press Room

Google's small business offer to beat the blues

Google is offering free online marketing to thousands of small and medium sized business to help them beat the economic blues.

Google said there were about 350,000 small to medium sized enterprises in the country but any company that had not tried its AdWords service could sign up for a $75 search marketing campaign.

Google general manager Australia & New Zealand Karim Temsamani said an online search result displayed a mixture of free and sponsored links, which when clicked on would generally cost a company no more than a few cents.

"A few dollars can go a very long way," Temsamani said. "We've got a number of examples of small businesses in New Zealand that have started very small with AdWords campaign and got enormous return investment and therefore we want to make sure that all businesses in New Zealand have the opportunity to really be able to trial search marketing."

Google globally generated more than US$20 billion of revenue, with the vast majority coming from its search products, including AdWords and AdSense, which partners with website owners to place adverts on their sites.

Google did not have set expectations for the response to its marketing campaign giveaway, Temsamani said.

"Essentially our view is that we need the eco system to continue growing and as we are helping small businesses grow their business we can see that if they are getting the right results from their search campaigns they will continue to use search as a means to dialogue and reach customers in the future."

Google has seen strong growth in search queries in the past year, he said.

"Kiwis are going online to research their purchases more carefully, whether it's a hotel or flights, a restaurant booking, a new credit card or a new consumer electronics gadget."

Google said travel searches were up nearly 30 per cent year on year since May, 2008, while automotive, finance/insurance and computer/ electronics were up 27 per cent, 20 per cent and 20 per cent respectively.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/small-business/news/article.cfm?c_id=85&objectid=10578628

Microsoft Aims at Google

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Microsoft has used attack ads to go after Apple, and now it has Google in its sights.

The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. That's a big campaign -- big compared with consumer-product launches ($50 million is considered a sizable budget for a national rollout) and very big when you consider that Google spent about $25 million on all its advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, with about $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting. Microsoft, by comparison, spent $361 million. Certainly Google has never faced an ad assault of anything like this magnitude.

JWT has been tapped for the push, which will include online, TV, print and radio. Another sign of the campaign's size: At a time when most agencies are laying people off, JWT added creatives on the Microsoft business last week.

People with knowledge of the planned push said the ads won't go after Google, or Yahoo for that matter, by name. Instead, they'll focus on planting the idea that today's search engines don't work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search (aka Google) really solves their problems. That, Microsoft is hoping, will give consumers a reason to consider switching search engines, which, of course, is one of Bing's biggest challenges.

http://digg.com/d1s3T3

Twitter like functionality could be added to search

While taking questions yesterday about alleged violation of anti-trust laws, Google execs including CEO Eric Schmidt reportedly told press that the company is, in the words of Reuters scribe Alexei Oreskovic, "looking at ... ways of integrating microblogging capabilities, such as those popularized by Twitter, into its search product."

That's news to us. Everything these days is about Twitter, though. Go to a party--talk about Twitter. Have a blog? Talk about Twitter. Use Twitter? Talk about Twitter. Apparently we can add to that: facing legal pressure over allegedly anti-competitive business practices? Talk about Twitter. There's absolutely no more information available about this - but below are three possible scenarios we can imagine for Google integrating microblogging into its search product.

The fact that Schmidt said what he did is just one reason to believe Google is going to do something with microblogging. There are several - most important is the fact that status sharing and activity streams are really useful, compelling and potentially valuable for both users and companies that dabble in them. Here's how it might go down.

Real Time Search

The most logical integration of microblogging and search would be microblogging search. Google already indexes Twitter messages, in some ways better than Twitter does. We can imagine "real time" being an option just like web, news, images and blogs on Google search. Here at ReadWriteWeb we use this tool to have that experience already. There is a whole lot that can be done with something like Twitter search if the user accounts tweeting the twits and twats are taken into account. Check out the nascent awesomeness at Twazzup, for example.

This probably isn't going to happen, though, as long as Twitter is the only microblogging game in town. There just isn't a meaningful data set of publicly available status updates elsewhere. Facebook status messages would be great to search but that would contradict the fundamental nature of the site - and Microsoft has a lot of skin in the game there.

We're hoping that open source microblogging technology from Laconi.ca will spread throughout the land and give engines something other than Twitter to search.

Source:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_ceo_says_microblogging_coming_to_google_sea.php