Just about a year ago, Twazzup launched one of the more interesting Twitter search engines and one month ago, it became one of the first services to get access to Twitter’s full firehose stream. Today, the company is launching its first new service based on this full Twitter stream: Twazzup Insights. Insights is a real-time Twitter analytics service that displays a lot of interesting data about any given keyword, as well as a list of the most influential Twitter users that use this keyword. In addition, Twazzup is also launching its web-based Twitter client Twazzup Reader out of beta.

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Twazzup Insights

The new analytics service is still in private alpha testing, but a couple of teaser reports on the site already show the application’s potential. Besides displaying the number of tweets and retweets about a given keyword per hour, the service also highlights the top links about this topic, as well as a list of the top influencers, as well as the most often used hashtags and other keywords in these tweets. In addition, Twazzup Insights also performs a basic sentiment analysis on these tweets.

If you would like to get early access to this service, you can use the request form on Twazzup Insights, or send an email to info[at]twazzup[dot]com.

Twazzup Reader

Twazzup Reader looks similar to Brizzly, but offers a number of interesting features that set it apart from the competition. Besides offering all the standard Twitter features (lists, search etc.), Twazzup Reader also shows images and short text snippets from all the links that appear in your stream. In addition, you can also filter every stream, including lists and persistent searches, by posts with images and videos. Whenever you are feeling especially helpful, you can also highlight all the messages that include a question.

Overall, Twazzup Reader is a very capable web-based Twitter client and definitely worth a try.

Discuss

Google has acquired the UK-based visual search engine company Plink, which makes PlinkArt, a mobile app that lets users take a picture with their phone and identify paintings and artworks. Google is adding Plink to work on its Google Goggles project.

Google introduced Goggles as a Google Labs project back in December. It was cool from the get go, but the potential it displayed was far greater than the actual functionality. The addition of Plink will allow Google to expand on that functionality. Google Goggles lets you search Google using pictures from your camera phone. They take an image as input, and using "several image recognition backends," such as object recognition, OCR, face matching, etc. Goggles returns relevant results (at least in theory). It even lets users get local business information without even taking a picture. For that, it uses GPS and compass data.

"We started Plink to bring the power of visual search to everyone, and we’re delighted to be taking a big step towards that goal today," say founders Mark Cummins and James Philbin. "Google has already shown that it’s serious about investing in this space with Google Goggles, and for the Plink team the opportunity to take our algorithms to Google-scale was just too exciting to pass up."

"The visual search engines of today can do some pretty cool things, but they still have a long long way to go," the pair add. "We’re looking forward to helping the Goggles team build a visual search engine that works not just for paintings or book covers, but for everything you see around you. There are beautiful things to be done with computer vision – it’s going to be a lot of fun!"

PlinkArt will still be available for download and will continue to work, but the company will no longer be updating it. They will instead focus all thier efforts on Google Goggles.

Financial terms of the Plink acquisition have not been disclosed.

It’s been about five months since Rupert Murdoch first claimed that he would block search engines from News Corp. content, and even if not a lot’s happened as a result, Murdoch hasn’t let the matter slide.  He issued another warning yesterday while at the National Press Club.

Do you think Murdoch will follow through on his threats?  Let us know by commenting.

"We are going to stop people like Google or Microsoft or whoever from taking stories for nothing . . . there is a law of copyright and they recognise it," Murdoch said according to Paul Harris.

The chairman and CEO of News Corp. later added, "They take [news content] for nothing.  They have got this very clever business model."

Of course, Murdoch didn’t make any fresh announcements regarding News Corp. content and pay walls, or establish any sort of timeframe for when he might do so.  So if these statements have any effect at all, they might weaken his position by highlighting the fact that Murdoch hasn’t taken action so far.

It’s possible that these comments will draw out a few more supporters, though, giving Murdoch a more defensible stance if he ever does flip the switch.  The situation will bear watching.

Tell us in the comments section what you make of Murdoch’s position.

UPDATE: In a new WebProNews video, Abby Johnson provides a good perspective on the conflict between publishers and search engines, citing recent events and cutting to an interview with Danny Sullivan.  You can watch the video below.

Google has acquired the UK-based visual search engine company Plink, which makes PlinkArt, a mobile app that lets users take a picture with their phone and identify paintings and artworks. Google is adding Plink to work on its Google Goggles project.

Google introduced Goggles as a Google Labs project back in December. It was cool from the get go, but the potential it displayed was far greater than the actual functionality. The addition of Plink will allow Google to expand on that functionality. Google Goggles lets you search Google using pictures from your camera phone. They take an image as input, and using "several image recognition backends," such as object recognition, OCR, face matching, etc. Goggles returns relevant results (at least in theory). It even lets users get local business information without even taking a picture. For that, it uses GPS and compass data.

"We started Plink to bring the power of visual search to everyone, and we’re delighted to be taking a big step towards that goal today," say founders Mark Cummins and James Philbin. "Google has already shown that it’s serious about investing in this space with Google Goggles, and for the Plink team the opportunity to take our algorithms to Google-scale was just too exciting to pass up."

"The visual search engines of today can do some pretty cool things, but they still have a long long way to go," the pair add. "We’re looking forward to helping the Goggles team build a visual search engine that works not just for paintings or book covers, but for everything you see around you. There are beautiful things to be done with computer vision – it’s going to be a lot of fun!"

PlinkArt will still be available for download and will continue to work, but the company will no longer be updating it. They will instead focus all thier efforts on Google Goggles.

Financial terms of the Plink acquisition have not been disclosed.

Earlier this year Google added a new product to the already overflowing social-space. Its name was Buzz and it instantly found itself in the same category (mainly for the built-in Gmail userbase) alongside both Twitter and Facebook. Based on all the hype surrounding Buzz, it seemed we were getting ready for the fight of social-space supremacy.

Fast-forward a few months

After the initial hype-fest died down, and the dust settled, most of the positive buzz has dissipated. What we’re left with are privacy concerns, a rampant spam problem and copyright issues from users. In an effort not to be totally negative in regards to Buzz, it should be noted that Google has been very quick addressing / fixing certain aspects of the service.

Do you think Google Buzz is a flop? Tell us what you think. 

This past week we asked the question, “Would you consider Google Buzz to be a flop?” on our WebProNews Facebook page. We were surprised by some of the answers left by our fans. My personal favorite comes from Steve Blaze; he states that Google Buzz is the biggest flop since the Edsel. (For those of unfamiliar with the Edsel, it was a brand of car from the Ford Motor Company with a disastrous history so therefore “Edsel” has become synonymous with failure).

One has to ask, why is Google having such a hard with social media? In many ways Google was a pioneer of social media, with their Orkut service (which is still immensely popular in both India and Brasil – but now the US where it counts).

Recently Chitika, an online advertising network, did some research within their network and found some interesting data pertaining to Buzz.

The report goes on to say… ”February 9th, 2010 – the day Buzz was launched – the search engines lit up with queries.  The Chitika network saw about 1,500 searches that day for the term “Google Buzz,” approximately 15 times the number of searches for “Twitter.”

However, those searches dropped off quickly – on February 10th, there were 580 searches; on the 11th, 147.  From the 12th on – only three days removed from Buzz’s much-hyped launch – searches for Google Buzz failed to break three digits, and in most cases elicited less than 10 searches per day.  During the same time, searches for Twitter remained fairly stable, averaging about 87 searches per day.”

What are some possible fixes for Google Buzz?

Social media users want services that make there experience easier… not just another service that brings nothing new to the table. There are numerous things that Google could add / tweak to make Buzz more user friendly, specifically here are 5 things that I would like to see…

1.) Lists – Twitter has them and so should Buzz.
2.) Groups – Again, Twitter has them so should Buzz.
3.) Hide all comments – until I want to see comments" option.
4.) Comment moderation – block directly from the comments (like on FriendFeed).
5.) Content filter – Don’t show me any photos from Picasa or posts from a specific user.

Do you have any ideas to improve Google Buzz? Let us know what you got.

Something else that would’ve made this list is Buzz not pulling tweets in real-time. It appears as though this issue maybe getting fixed, a recent message from Josh Wills, an engineer on the Buzz team, explained…

"Okay, change is out everywhere. Here’s the scoop: we’re doing an experiment where we’re going to trust the timestamps on tweets (and by "experiment," I mean rolling it out to everyone, everywhere, all at once.) The net effect of this should be to do away with "tweet dumping", where you’re buzzing along and a whole bunch of tweets show up all at once because we just crawled them and push your page all around. Now, if a tweet shows up at the top of the stream, it will be because it just happened, or because a buzzer commented on it.

Personally, I really like Twitter, and I want better integration between Twitter and Buzz. My hope is that this is a temporary change until we work out a way to play nicely together that is beneficial to everyone."

So Google Buzz might not be exactly what we expected when it first launched earlier this year… but only time will tell if it becomes a major player in the social-space.

Do you see Google Buzz becoming a major player? Or will it just fizzle out? Tell us what you think.

Yahoo is posting a series of "how-to" articles for social media on the company’s advertising blog. Interestingly enough, the subject of the latest edition is "How to Dominate Search Results Through Social Media Sites," and the example Yahoo’s Laura Lippay points to as how to do it is Matt Cutts, who of course works for Yahoo’s chief rival, Google.

Ironically, Lippay talked to us last summer about "the secret" to outranking your competitors:

She looks at a sample of Yahoo’s search results for the query, "Matt Cutts":

"Not only does Matt’s own blog appear at the top of the page, but he also dominates the results with his likeness on several sites, including Wikipedia, Twitter, Blippy and Facebook.," says Lippay. "Although not everyone can have their own page on Wikipedia, social networks like the ones that Cutts appears on are prime examples of how you can dominate search results for your name or brand."

"As websites gain search engines’ trust and rise in importance over time the way social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and others have been doing, they tend to rank well in search results," adds Laura. "Try creating (and maintaining when possible) profiles on other sites like MySpace, Squidoo, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr or any number of social sites that make public profiles available to search engines. Search engines will often show image or video thumbnails from some of these sites in search results as well, which generally evokes more click-throughs. All of these pages with your name or your brand could end up in front of prospective clients or any searchers looking for you or your company. "

First of all, I’m not criticizing Lippay for pointing to how the employee of a rival is doing things right. Frankly, Cutts does make for a pretty good example of her point (Lippay herself also has a decent amount of profiles showing up in a search for her own name as well), and neither Google nore Yahoo is really in the business of SEO, so the the point is fairly moot.

The post did lead me to compare the Yahoo results with Google’s results for "matt cutts" which may or may not have been intended. While it’s certainly a matter of opinion, I have to say, Yahoo actually provides the more relevant results in this particular example, which is interesting, considering the query is for a Google guy. Personalization features could possibly be involved, but I don’t see why they would keep a Facebook result out of the mix, especially considering I’m Facebook friends with Cutts.

As a matter of fact, I wrote about a relevance issue I found with this exact query not too long ago – I found that when I searched for "matt cutts", Google’s personalized results (the starred results feature in particular) were pushing down the more relevant results.

Looking at the results for the query again, I’m not even seeing Matt’s Facebook profile. To Laura’s point about "trust and rise in importance" with regards to sites like Facebook (it recently surpassed Google as the most-visited site in a week’s time, mind you), it’s interesting that his Facebook profile wouldn’t be anywhere near the top of the results. In fact, it’s not even in the first ten pages. On Yahoo it’s in the top 3 or 4.

Granted, on Google, all I would have to do to find him on Facebook would be search for "Matt Cutts, Facebook profile", but without the result in a search for just "matt cutts", Google is telling me that this is more relevant, not to mention the starred results and all the rest. 

So, this tells me a few things:

1. A Facebook profile doesn’t necessarily equal relevance in Google

2. Google’s results are not always more relevant than the other search engines (not that this is startling revelation)

3. Lippay’s advice is still good. The results for the Cutts query on Google still do return his blog, his Wikipedia page, his Twitter account, his FriendFeed account, etc. Cutts is still in pretty good shape on Google results for his name, as far as dominating the results.

I’m not sure I have one particular point to all of this, I’m sorry to say. I just thought it was interesting that: a. Yahoo would point to how a Googler does things and b. Yahoo has better results for that Googler (in my opinion). Just observations (it’s probably not going to make me use Google any less).  Lippay’s own point about dominating results for your name/brand  is worth paying attention to anyway.

By the way, as Lippay notes, just creating your social profiles may not be enough. You probably don’t want to dominate the search results with a bunch of profiles that aren’t up to date or offering something of value to users.

According to the latest data from analytics firm Hitwise, Ask managed to grow an astonishing 21% last month (from 2.84% to 3.44%), while Microsoft’s Bing actually lost 1%. After a long period of slow but steady decline, the total number of U.S. searches on Yahoo grew about 3% last month, while Google lost about 1% and fell under 70%. Alternative search engines only accounted for 1.93% of all U.S. searches.

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Verticals

Even though Bing lost some ground in the overall search market, it did quite well in the verticals it already specializes in. Year-over-Year, the percentage of upstream traffic from Bing to automotive, health, shopping and travel sites grew more than 100%. Month-to-month, Bing also saw double-digit growth according to Hitwise.

Google, of course, remains the most important source of traffic for these verticals and it’s worth noting that even though Bing’s important is growing, it only delivers between 2 and 4% of the upstream traffic for these key industries. To some degree, though, Bing isn’t really interested in delivering this traffic to outside sources and would rather serve its customers by giving them answers right on its own site.

Discuss

It’s been about five months since Rupert Murdoch first claimed that he would block search engines from News Corp. content, and even if not a lot’s happened as a result, Murdoch hasn’t let the matter slide.  He issued another warning yesterday while at the National Press Club.

"We are going to stop people like Google or Microsoft or whoever from taking stories for nothing . . . there is a law of copyright and they recognise it," Murdoch said according to Paul Harris.

The chairman and CEO of News Corp. later added, "They take [news content] for nothing.  They have got this very clever business model."

Of course, Murdoch didn’t make any fresh announcements regarding News Corp. content and pay walls, or establish any sort of timeframe for when he might do so.  So if these statements have any effect at all, they might weaken his position by highlighting the fact that Murdoch hasn’t taken action so far.

It’s possible that these comments will draw out a few more supporters, though, giving Murdoch a more defensible stance if he ever does flip the switch.  The situation will bear watching.

Last year, we saw the emergence of the technology PubSubHubbub, which provides real-time notifications to subscribers of content when there is new content or updates being made. There has recently been talk about Google developing a system that would use this technology it its indexing process.

Do you want your content indexed instantly? Share your thoughts.

In fact, Google’s Matt Cutts spoke with WebProNews about this, among other things:

"Maybe some small site, you might only find a chance to crawl its pages once a week, but if that site is blogging like every 20 minutes, boom , you hit the submit button, and the search engines can find out about it," explained Cutts.

"Now the tension is that more spammers would use this as well, so you can’t just say, ‘I’m gonna index everything that everybody pushes to me.’ So finding the right balance there is tricky, but the potential is really, really exciting," he said.

"You can definitely imagine the reputable blogs getting very fast updates – the ones that we think are trustworthy, and then over time, maybe ramping that up, so that more and more people have the ability to do…just like, instant indexing," he says.

And here we see another way Google may end up looking at the trust factor, with regards to ranking.

Can We Learn from How Google Does Real-Time Search?

Liz Gannes at GigaOm recapped a few things Google senior product manager Dylan Casey said at SMX last month:

Casey said perhaps the most complex project in real time is to determine when to trigger the appearance of real-time results in search results. "We have huge internal debates on: Is this a good answer to this question, or are we just creating a tool for low-quality content?" he said.

Casey spent some effort justifying Google paying to include Twitter’s real-time firehose of tweets, saying it was an intensive technical integration on both sides, and that tweets are a fundamentally different form of communication due to the restrictions of their form. For example, Google has developed a ‘complex system’ for removing users’ public tweets that are later deleted or marked private.

Earlier this year, Amit Singhal, who has led development of real-time search at Google talked about how Google ranks tweets. According to him, Google ranks tweets by followers to an extent, but it’s not just about how many followers you get. It’s about how reputable those followers are.

Singhal likens the system to the well-known Google system of link popularity. Getting good links from reputable sources helps your content in Google, so having followers with that same kind of authority theoretically helps your tweets rank in Google’s real-time search.

"One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation," Singhal says. "As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well."

Now Google’s current real-time search product is separate from the whole PubSubHubbub-based system that isn’t in place yet, but Matt’s comments about blogs being trustworthy, indicates to me that trust is going to be key in being able to push content to Google’s index in real-time. So, I wonder if a similar strategy to how Google ranks its current real-time and Twitter results will be employed in determining this kind of trust.

Does This Mean If You’re Not Trusted You Won’t Get Indexed?

"PuSH wouldn’t likely replace crawling, in fact a crawl would be needed to discover PuSH feeds to subscribe to, but the real-time format would be used to augment Google’s existing index," says Marshall Kirkpatrick, who spoke in a session on the real-time web at SXSW, which also included Google’s Brett Slatkin, one of the guys responsible for PuSH (he’s in the following video explaining the technology in simple terms).

Lots of sites out there already have PuSH technology in place. For example, WordPress and Typepad blogs have the ability to "PuSH" their content. That’s a lot of content itself. A lot of user-generated content, and that means the potential for spam is huge, which is why the trust factor is so important.

If PuSh is to be heavily utilized by the search engines, and you want your content indexed as quickly as possible, you’re going to want to do what you can to build community trust and a solid reputation. One more reason to engage in meticulous online reputation management, put out great content, and engage with the community.

Do you want to see Google index the web in real-time? Discuss here.

Last year, we saw the emergence of the technology PubSubHubbub, which provides real-time notifications to subscribers of content when there is new content or updates being made. There has recently been talk about Google developing a system that would use this technology it its indexing process.

Do you want your content indexed instantly? Share your thoughts.

In fact, Google’s Matt Cutts spoke with WebProNews about this, among other things:

"Maybe some small site, you might only find a chance to crawl its pages once a week, but if that site is blogging like every 20 minutes, boom , you hit the submit button, and the search engines can find out about it," explained Cutts.

"Now the tension is that more spammers would use this as well, so you can’t just say, ‘I’m gonna index everything that everybody pushes to me.’ So finding the right balance there is tricky, but the potential is really, really exciting," he said.

"You can definitely imagine the reputable blogs getting very fast updates – the ones that we think are trustworthy, and then over time, maybe ramping that up, so that more and more people have the ability to do…just like, instant indexing," he says.

And here we see another way Google may end up looking at the trust factor, with regards to ranking.

Can We Learn from How Google Does Real-Time Search?

Liz Gannes at GigaOm recapped a few things Google senior product manager Dylan Casey said at SMX last month:

Casey said perhaps the most complex project in real time is to determine when to trigger the appearance of real-time results in search results. "We have huge internal debates on: Is this a good answer to this question, or are we just creating a tool for low-quality content?" he said.

Casey spent some effort justifying Google paying to include Twitter’s real-time firehose of tweets, saying it was an intensive technical integration on both sides, and that tweets are a fundamentally different form of communication due to the restrictions of their form. For example, Google has developed a ‘complex system’ for removing users’ public tweets that are later deleted or marked private.

Earlier this year, Amit Singhal, who has led development of real-time search at Google talked about how Google ranks tweets. According to him, Google ranks tweets by followers to an extent, but it’s not just about how many followers you get. It’s about how reputable those followers are.

Singhal likens the system to the well-known Google system of link popularity. Getting good links from reputable sources helps your content in Google, so having followers with that same kind of authority theoretically helps your tweets rank in Google’s real-time search.

"One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation," Singhal says. "As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well."

Now Google’s current real-time search product is separate from the whole PubSubHubbub-based system that isn’t in place yet, but Matt’s comments about blogs being trustworthy, indicates to me that trust is going to be key in being able to push content to Google’s index in real-time. So, I wonder if a similar strategy to how Google ranks its current real-time and Twitter results will be employed in determining this kind of trust.

Does This Mean If You’re Not Trusted You Won’t Get Indexed?

"PuSH wouldn’t likely replace crawling, in fact a crawl would be needed to discover PuSH feeds to subscribe to, but the real-time format would be used to augment Google’s existing index," says Marshall Kirkpatrick, who spoke in a session on the real-time web at SXSW, which also included Google’s Brett Slatkin, one of the guys responsible for PuSH (he’s in the following video explaining the technology in simple terms).

Lots of sites out there already have PuSH technology in place. For example, WordPress and Typepad blogs have the ability to "PuSH" their content. That’s a lot of content itself. A lot of user-generated content, and that means the potential for spam is huge, which is why the trust factor is so important.

If PuSh is to be heavily utilized by the search engines, and you want your content indexed as quickly as possible, you’re going to want to do what you can to build community trust and a solid reputation. One more reason to engage in meticulous online reputation management, put out great content, and engage with the community.

Do you want to see Google index the web in real-time? Discuss here.

The New York Times’ new Doc Viewer 2.0 is, depending on what you value, either a pasted-on ornament of no real use to a typical news consumer, or it’s an open-source, crowd-sourcing game changer.

With information-taming technologies like search engines already at a reader’s fingertips, there is debatable value in the Doc Viewer’s ability to annotate a story with “raw” information. However, the fact that the Doc Viewer’s code is due to be released on an open-source basis introduces an additional value to it. It is not just the back-end that a media source, of whatever size, will have access to, but the whole megillah.

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Want annotated source materials embedded in your kitty blog without having to churn code until the tears flow? You can do it.

This latest viewer by the New York Times is the latest iteration of a two year development process. The viewer allows reporters to augment stories by including evidentiary documentation and providing context to news stories. The viewer keys documents to words or phrases in the source story, allowing viewers to pursue the process to the depth they prefer. These “annotations” are similar to an old-fashioned “hot link” but with a new-fangled dynamic delivery.

Future versions will open up the annotation process to readers, instead of just the writers and editors. Additional features may include an embeddable version for blogs, a search-friendly version without JavaScript, variable image file type control and the ability to create custom annotation shapes. The open-source software behind Version 2.0 will be released “in the very, very near future,” according to the newspaper, and will be available on the Times’ Github page.

The key criticism to this undertaking, of course, is: so what?

BayNewswer quoted Aron Pilhofer, the paper’s editor for interactive newsroom technologies, as “recognizing that news organizations are slowly but gradually becoming more and more like technology companies.” They are, that is, more likely to triumph if they leverage a wider distribution of invested community members.

Alan McLean, interface engineer at the Times, says his focus is on the Doc Viewer as a reporting tool.

“Fundamentally what we are trying to do here is get as many tools in the belts of reporters as we can to assist them in telling stories online,” he told RWW. “Seeing it as a publishing platform is somewhat limited. It really depends on the kind of content that is being published.”

However, Chris Heisel, in a post on an earlier version of this viewer, said, “In a world where I can easily find more infor­ma­tion than I can ever pos­si­bly use does the public really need more access to raw infor­ma­tion.”

We read news in a politically and socially polarized environment. The most common charge against the NY Times – this most mainstream of MSM – is bias, that there is nothing more than a writer’s unexamined feelings or political secret sauce to support the angle of a given story. With foundational documents appended to the story itself, the reasonableness of the reporter’s approach should prove easier to determine.

But that is posited on the not-altogether-likely notion that reason and reality will overpower the desire to froth.

The New York Times is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

Discuss

Getting press coverage can mean a great deal for gaining traffic and overall exposure for your business. That said, there are also ways to take some initiative yourself in getting some exposure from news search.

Is news search part of your strategy? Real-time? Social Search? Press releases? Discuss here.

News Search Optimization

As Lisa Buyer of the Buyer Group talked about with WebProNews at SES last week, news search optimization is getting more powerful with social media and real-time search. Add these to older tactics like blogs and press releases, and there have never been more opportunities to get news-related content discovered.

Press Releases

Press releases can still be a great way to spread the word about any announcements your business might have. They can also drive traffic, particularly from search engines.

Back in the summer, PRWeb shared a case study with us, involving a firm that typically sees a boost in search engine rankings and a 50% spike in web traffic after they issue a release. In fact, for one release in particular, the firm saw a spike of 400% on two different Web sites, and the firm doesn’t believe they were from the same users. They also incorporate social media tools like Twitter to extend the "shelf life" of press releases, and say that drives additional traffic.

"When we included a link to our press releases on Twitter and other social media networks, we saw these both expanded the scope of distribution and the extended the longevity of the announcement," the CEO of the company behind the case study had said.  "With other news releases we saw an initial spike in Web site traffic on the first two days and then it dropped off.  With these features we’ve seen increases in traffic up to five days after the news release was issued."

Remember, Google News indexes press releases as well.

Real-Time Search

You’re probably already using social media in some capacity at this point. Real-time search presents an added benefit to talking about timely topics using channels that you are already using (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, etc.). That doesn’t mean spam. Spamming won’t get you very far here anyway, because Google is pretty good at filtering this. We went over a few basic tips for real-time search optimization a while back. The recap is below, but you can find them elaborated on here.

1. Use keywords
2. Talk about timely events
3. Have a lot of followers (who can share your content)
4. Promote Conversation
5. Include Calls to Engagement

Real-time search is much more than just Google. There are an increasing number of players in this space, and with the rise in smartphone usage, mobile apps are giving consumers a lot of choices in how to obtain their information.

Social Search

Another great benefit of using social media means you get to show up in your friends/followers personalized social search results for numerous queries on Google. Newsy topics are frequently the ones that trend, and that means lots of people searching. If something big happens, there’s a chance that some of your social network contacts will search for something related to that, and if you have something to say about it, there’s a good chance they’ll see it in their results.

Of course people search with the social networks themselves as well. Facebook search queries were on the rise last time I checked.

Google News

Last September, we ran down a number of Google News SEO tips here. Google shared some tips of their own on the subject as well:

Optimizing for news search means more shots at showing up in search results period. Do you have other ideas about getting in front of news seekers? Share here.

Getting press coverage can mean a great deal for gaining traffic and overall exposure for your business. That said, there are also ways to take some initiative yourself in getting some exposure from news search.

News Search Optimization

As Lisa Buyer of the Buyer Group talked about with WebProNews at SES last week, news search optimization is getting more powerful with social media and real-time search. Add these to older tactics like blogs and press releases, and there have never been more opportunities to get news-related content discovered.

Press Releases

Press releases can still be a great way to spread the word about any announcements your business might have. They can also drive traffic, particularly from search engines.

Back in the summer, PRWeb shared a case study with us, involving a firm that typically sees a boost in search engine rankings and a 50% spike in web traffic after they issue a release. In fact, for one release in particular, the firm saw a spike of 400% on two different Web sites, and the firm doesn’t believe they were from the same users. They also incorporate social media tools like Twitter to extend the "shelf life" of press releases, and say that drives additional traffic.

"When we included a link to our press releases on Twitter and other social media networks, we saw these both expanded the scope of distribution and the extended the longevity of the announcement," the CEO of the company behind the case study had said.  "With other news releases we saw an initial spike in Web site traffic on the first two days and then it dropped off.  With these features we’ve seen increases in traffic up to five days after the news release was issued."

Remember, Google News indexes press releases as well.

Real-Time Search

You’re probably already using social media in some capacity at this point. Real-time search presents an added benefit to talking about timely topics using channels that you are already using (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, etc.). That doesn’t mean spam. Spamming won’t get you very far here anyway, because Google is pretty good at filtering this. We went over a few basic tips for real-time search optimization a while back. The recap is below, but you can find them elaborated on here.

1. Use keywords
2. Talk about timely events
3. Have a lot of followers (who can share your content)
4. Promote Conversation
5. Include Calls to Engagement

Real-time search is much more than just Google. There are an increasing number of players in this space, and with the rise in smartphone usage, mobile apps are giving consumers a lot of choices in how to obtain their information.

Social Search

Another great benefit of using social media means you get to show up in your friends/followers personalized social search results for numerous queries on Google. Newsy topics are frequently the ones that trend, and that means lots of people searching. If something big happens, there’s a chance that some of your social network contacts will search for something related to that, and if you have something to say about it, there’s a good chance they’ll see it in their results.

Of course people search with the social networks themselves as well. Facebook search queries were on the rise last time I checked.

Google News

Last September, we ran down a number of Google News SEO tips here. Google shared some tips of their own on the subject as well:

Optimizing for news search means more shots at showing up in search results period. Do you have other ideas about getting in front of news seekers? Share here.

Google’s decision to redirect Chinese searchers to Google.com.hk is having some serious repercussions.  On Monday, Chinese Internet company Tom Online distanced itself from Google.  China Unicom followed suit on Wednesday.  And now, Motorola has also turned its back on the search giant.

Mark Lee and Hugo Miller reported late yesterday, "Motorola Inc., the handset maker that’s rebuilding its mobile-phone business around Google Inc.’s Android software, has dropped the U.S. Internet company’s search engine from one of its Android phones in China."

It looks like Baidu and Bing will be used as replacements, and in certain regards, that isn’t too shocking.  Deals between Motorola, Baidu, and Bing were announced months ago, and the two search engines represent the market leader and an obvious American alternative, respectively.

Still, as Lee and Miller pointed out, Google and Android are supposed to be central to Motorola’s strategy; the company’s in fact claimed that it will release 20-30 Android phones this year.  So Motorola must either have little confidence in Google’s ability to impress Chinese users, or it faced quite a lot of pressure to part ways with the American search giant.

Both of these possibilities imply that the fallout might continue.  Google fans, hold tight.