YouTube still claims to be the second largest search engine in the world. Just think about that for a minute. If you produce online video and it’s not on YouTube, you’re probably missing out on a great deal of potential viewers. If you’re not producing video at all, you’re missing out a lot of searches.

Do you consider YouTube important to search marketing? Let us know.

However, just uploading content to YouTube is not going to be enough. Like with any other form of search engine, content needs to be optimized to be found. At SXSW in Austin back in March, WebProNews spoke with Margaret Gould Stewart, who leads YouTube’s user experience team. She talked about some reasons a lot of content producers are missing out on some tremendous opportunities when they use the world’s most popular online video site.

"When you’re building a sustained audience, you have to continually create great content that connects with your audience," says Stewart. "I think the secondary part is understanding your audience – understanding who you want to reach, and proactively cultivating a relationship with the people in your audience. And on YouTube that means not just creating great content and uploading it to the site, but actively building your subscriber base, so that you can be in direct and regular interaction and conversation with those people."

"We find that video producers who are really active in the conversation, whether it’s comments or uploading ‘how this video was made’- you know, kind of the behind-the-scenes – people are really fascinated by that stuff, and we see some our most successful partners really having that, again, kind of ongoing conversation – not an arm’s length relationship to the audience, but very engaged," she adds.

More WebProNews Videos

"We sometimes see content producers not investing enough time in attaching great meta data to their content, because like I said, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and we all know that for Google, it’s important to think seriously about search engine optimization, because you can have the great content, and ideally the cream will float to the top, but there’s definitely things you can do to help yourself along, right?"

"Good clear, direct titling of your content, putting the right kinds of tags…because the fact is initially when content goes viral, people may discover it through search engines, or embed it in blogs, but then it reaches that really exciting word-of-mouth status, where I just may mention it to you person-to-person, and then what most people do is just go to YouTube.com and they search for it," she continues. "So if you’re not indexed well in the search engine because you haven’t attached great meta data to your content, you’re going to miss out on that audience."

"The other thing that is really important is enabling embedding," notes Stewart. "It’s probably the number one most important thing, because what we see in videos that become very popular, very quickly and take on that kind of life of its own, a lot of that initial traffic in the first 48 hours happens actually off-site."

Note: This actually plays to a point I made about Twitter embeds as well.

If you want more success from your online video endeavors, read 35 Ways to Improve Your Online Video Performance, and Tips For Ranking Higher On and With YouTube, which features an interview with YouTube Product Manager Matt Liu. If real-time, live video is your thing, check out 8 Tips for Real-Time Video Blogging.

By the way, YouTube is renting movies now, and while it’s not exactly taking over Netflix at this point, I would expect this to grow significantly and get more people spending more time at YouTube, where there is a YouTube search box very close by, and relevant related video suggestions served to viewers constantly.

Is YouTube a significant part of your marketing strategy? Comment here.

Google has launched a very interesting new search option, with its Twitter archive. What this does is let users search for a topic, and look at all available tweets about that topic in chronological order. If you want to see tweets about President Obama for example, you can do so by going to any year, month, or day and seeing what was said about him on Twitter. Google can do this since it has access to Twitter’s info, which allows Google to index its real-time Twitter results. A Google spokesperson tells WebProNews it would be possible to do something similar with other sites through PuSH.

To me, while this is an interesting way of searching Twitter (in fact, I called it what Twtiter search should be), it gets even more interesting if you consider that Google is developing a system for sites to push content to Google in real-time, via PubSubHubbub (or PuSH). Google’s Matt Cutts spoke with WebProNews about potential PuSH integration recently (read about it more here):

Will Google make it an option to browse entire archives of sites in a similar fashion to what it is doing with Twitter? This could be a quite useful feature, and it would certainly fall along the lines of "organizing the world’s information." Let’s say I remember reading a New York Times article several months back that I’d like to reference in one of my own articles, but I can’t remember what it was called exactly, and I have a hard time finding it through a traditional web search. Being able to drill down into the archives in this way could make the search process much more helpful – a better user experience.

Of course most content sites have their own search features (sometimes even provided by Google), and you could try using that, but quite frankly these site search features aren’t always that great. In fact, they’re very often terrible. Google knows search, and it is still the most dominant search destination. It would make a ton of sense for such an option to be available.

I reached out to Google to see if this was a potential option. "The scenario described is indeed possible but we don’t have anything to announce today," a Google spokesperson tells me. To be clear, when he says "possible," he’s referring to the technology making such a scenario possible. As he said, there’s no announcement, and this may not even be on Google’s list of things to do. But, you never know. 

Google Labs already has a timeline feature for news.

Would you like to see Google offer timeline-like archives of site updates? Tell us what you think.

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.

As online marketing and search engine marketing in particular have evolved over the years, more and more metrics and data sources have become available to marketers. This is a great thing for analyzing campaigns and strategies, learning from them and improving upon them. However, all of this data can get extremely overwhelming, which is why it’s important to have strategies for the analytical process itself.

A couple weeks ago, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik gave a keynote speech at Search Engine Strategies New York. WebProNews interviewed him shortly after, picking his brain about how online marketers can sort through and maximize the incredible amounts of data they have access to.

Kaushik says a lot of people will open their analytics tool and just look at the top ten or twenty rows of data, but there are strategies to help you see more of the picture. A few specific examples:

- In-line segmentation
- Tag Clouds
- Keyword trees

Basically, these are all things that can take large amounts of keywords and let you visualize the top performers, and understand the data. It can help you look at how strong your brand terms are, compared with different categories, for example. These things are explored further in Avinash’s keynote:

Avinash places great emphasis on quantifying the economic value of things – your different goals. Quantify the "micro-conversions" as he calls them. This could be placing a dollar value on RSS feed subscribers, or on ad clicks, affiliate clicks, number of reviews, number of downloads, number of phone calls that were made to convert offline, etc.

"Quantify the complete impact of a site, otherwise you’re going to be making bad decisions," he says.

The more you can break down your site in terms of the goals you are trying to achieve, and place specific values on these goals, the better you can understand the bigger picture and the vast amount of analytical data that concerns the performance of your online marketing efforts.

As online marketing and search engine marketing in particular have evolved over the years, more and more metrics and data sources have become available to marketers. This is a great thing for analyzing campaigns and strategies, learning from them and improving upon them. However, all of this data can get extremely overwhelming, which is why it’s important to have strategies for the analytical process itself.

A couple weeks ago, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik gave a keynote speech at Search Engine Strategies New York. WebProNews interviewed him shortly after, picking his brain about how online marketers can sort through and maximize the incredible amounts of data they have access to.

Kaushik says a lot of people will open their analytics tool and just look at the top ten or twenty rows of data, but there are strategies to help you see more of the picture. A few specific examples:

- In-line segmentation
- Tag Clouds
- Keyword trees

Basically, these are all things that can take large amounts of keywords and let you visualize the top performers, and understand the data. It can help you look at how strong your brand terms are, compared with different categories, for example. These things are explored further in Avinash’s keynote:

Avinash places great emphasis on quantifying the economic value of things – your different goals. Quantify the "micro-conversions" as he calls them. This could be placing a dollar value on RSS feed subscribers, or on ad clicks, affiliate clicks, number of reviews, number of downloads, number of phone calls that were made to convert offline, etc.

"Quantify the complete impact of a site, otherwise you’re going to be making bad decisions," he says.

The more you can break down your site in terms of the goals you are trying to achieve, and place specific values on these goals, the better you can understand the bigger picture and the vast amount of analytical data that concerns the performance of your online marketing efforts.

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.

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.

A recent study found that consumers are getting more comfortable with mobile shopping, and you best believe that will only continue, as people continue to spend more of their web time on their phones. So as everybody reaches for their mobile devices to make payments, which platforms are they going to use?

PayPal hopes to stay in the drivers seat in this area. WebProNews interviewed Francesco Rovetta, director of business development for PayPal Mobile at SXSW a couple weeks ago, who talked a bit about PayPal’s vision for mobile.

PayPal is certainly not the only player in this space though.

O’Reilly Media Founder Tim O’Reilly has posted a fascinating piece on the "State of the Internet Operating System," which explores in depth, just what the phrase operating system means in the age of the cloud, and the mobile web. While he talks about this with regards to search, media access, communications, identity, advertising, location, and a slew of other categories, one section of this lengthy article talks specifically about payments.

"Payment is another key subsystem of the Internet Operating System," he says. "Companies like Apple that have 150 million credit cards on file and a huge population of users accustomed to using their phones to buy songs, videos, applications, and now ebooks, are going to be in a prime position to turn today’s phone into tomorrow’s wallet. (And as anyone who reaches into a wallet not for payment but for ID knows, payment systems are also powerful, authenticated identity stores – a fact that won’t always be lost on payment providers looking for their lock on a piece of the Internet future.)"

"PayPal obviously plays an important role as an internet payment subsystem that’s already in wide use by developers," he continues. "It operates in 190 countries, in 19 different currencies (not counting in-game micro-currencies) and it has over 185 million accounts. What’s fascinating is the rich developer ecosystem they’ve built around payment – their recent developer conference had over 2000 attendees. Their challenge is to make the transition from the web to mobile."

UPDATE: PayPal contacted me, pointing out errors in O’Reilly’s numbers. "We now have 81 mil active registered accounts and 210 million accounts, in 190 markets and we support 24 currencies."

O’Reilly also mentions Google and Amazon as key players in the mobile payments space, with the Android Market giving Google Checkout a boost, and Amazon having only recently opened theirs up a bit to developers.

Then you have Facebook, who last year started letting users buy physical goods with virtual currency. As business sell more products through Facebook, which is happening more and more, Facebook may play an increasingly bigger role in mobile payments. Mobile Facebook users are usually signed into their accounts all the time.

Which of these payment services do you see yourself using most a year or two from now? Something else? Share your thoughts.

A recent study found that consumers are getting more comfortable with mobile shopping, and you best believe that will only continue, as people continue to spend more of their web time on their phones. So as everybody reaches for their mobile devices to make payments, which platforms are they going to use?

PayPal hopes to stay in the drivers seat in this area. WebProNews interviewed Francesco Rovetta, director of business development for PayPal Mobile at SXSW a couple weeks ago, who talked a bit about PayPal’s vision for mobile.

PayPal is certainly not the only player in this space though.

O’Reilly Media Founder Tim O’Reilly has posted a fascinating piece on the "State of the Internet Operating System," which explores in depth, just what the phrase operating system means in the age of the cloud, and the mobile web. While he talks about this with regards to search, media access, communications, identity, advertising, location, and a slew of other categories, one section of this lengthy article talks specifically about payments.

"Payment is another key subsystem of the Internet Operating System," he says. "Companies like Apple that have 150 million credit cards on file and a huge population of users accustomed to using their phones to buy songs, videos, applications, and now ebooks, are going to be in a prime position to turn today’s phone into tomorrow’s wallet. (And as anyone who reaches into a wallet not for payment but for ID knows, payment systems are also powerful, authenticated identity stores – a fact that won’t always be lost on payment providers looking for their lock on a piece of the Internet future.)"

"PayPal obviously plays an important role as an internet payment subsystem that’s already in wide use by developers," he continues. "It operates in 190 countries, in 19 different currencies (not counting in-game micro-currencies) and it has over 185 million accounts. What’s fascinating is the rich developer ecosystem they’ve built around payment – their recent developer conference had over 2000 attendees. Their challenge is to make the transition from the web to mobile."

O’Reilly also mentions Google and Amazon as key players in the mobile payments space, with the Android Market giving Google Checkout a boost, and Amazon having only recently opened theirs up a bit to developers.

Then you have Facebook, who last year started letting users buy physical goods with virtual currency. As business sell more products through Facebook, which is happening more and more, Facebook may play an increasingly bigger role in mobile payments. Mobile Facebook users are usually signed into their accounts all the time.

Which of these payment services do you see yourself using most a year or two from now? Something else? Share your thoughts.

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.

YouTube EDU turned one year old today, and it’s now one of the largest online video repositories of higher education content in the world, according to the company. "The team’s work in the last 365 days shows," YouTube’s Chris Dale tells WebProNews.

Dale shared the following highlights of YouTube EDU’s first year:

- YouTube EDU has tripled its partner base to over 300 colleges and universities.

- We have grown to include university content in 7 languages across 10 countries.

- Google’s auto-captioning and auto-translate technology has broadened accessibility to students hearing impaired students, and students who speak different languages
 
- We now have over 350 full courses on YouTube EDU, a 75% increase from a year ago.
 
- Today, our video library stands at 65,000 videos.

- 1000s of aspiring students have viewed EDU partner videos tens of millions of times in their search for great educational content.

Don’t forget that YouTube recently rolled out automated captions and auto-translation. According to the company, you can generate captions and translate courses into 50 different languages.

YouTube has long been a great educational tool, even before the launch of YouTube EDU. In fact, I wrote about five reasons for this several months before YouTube EDU came out.

YouTube EDU turned one year old today, and it’s now one of the largest online video repositories of higher education content in the world, according to the company. "The team’s work in the last 365 days shows," YouTube’s Chris Dale tells WebProNews.

Dale shared the following highlights of YouTube EDU’s first year:

- YouTube EDU has tripled its partner base to over 300 colleges and universities.

- We have grown to include university content in 7 languages across 10 countries.

- Google’s auto-captioning and auto-translate technology has broadened accessibility to students hearing impaired students, and students who speak different languages
 
- We now have over 350 full courses on YouTube EDU, a 75% increase from a year ago.
 
- Today, our video library stands at 65,000 videos.

- 1000s of aspiring students have viewed EDU partner videos tens of millions of times in their search for great educational content.

Don’t forget that YouTube recently rolled out automated captions and auto-translation. According to the company, you can generate captions and translate courses into 50 different languages.

YouTube has long been a great educational tool, even before the launch of YouTube EDU. In fact, I wrote about five reasons for this several months before YouTube EDU came out.

After a long morning of travel and SXSW preperation, WebProNews popped in on an interesting talk from writer and tech watcher, Kaiser Kuo (here’s his bio) about what might happen with the whole Google/China situation, which has essentially remained at a stand-still for the past two months, since Google made its famous announcement about a "new approach to China."

Kuo said right out that he doesn’t have the "inside dope" about what’s happening within Google, but he did give a fascinating history of Google’s efforts in China, as well as a look at some possible scenarios that could play out. Some he listed specifically, include:

Worst Case Scenarios

- Blow up: Google decamps in atmosphere of acrimony
- Google.com blocked, possibly even Gmail, Gtalk, Google Docs, Buzz, etc.
- All google products exit from China (partnerships with mobile companies end)

Moderate (and according to Kuo, most likely) Scenarios

- Google.cn shuttered
- Google.com, Gmail, Google Docs, etc. unblocked
- Google research and development and sales continue to operate in China
- Google continues mobile partnerships

Best Case (and not very likely, but not entirely far-fetched) Scenario

- Google.cn stops censoring and still stays in china
- Pigs fly over a frozen hell scape

The session was not without a sense of humor, but that’s not to say Kuo doesn’t take the situation very seriously. In fact, he appears to be putting much more time into looking at the big picture than anyone I’ve seen (at least those outside of Google itself and the Chinese government).

Perhaps the most interesting part of Kuo’s talk was about how  the wetern media’s attention focuses more on one of two kinds of censorship going on – the "Great Firewall" censorship, where many sites are blocked at the ISP level. He says it’s fairly simple for Chinese Internet users to "hop" the Great Firewall through proxies and VPNs. The other kind of censorship going on in China, according to Kuo, is the kind that really matters. This is "self discipline", which is carried out by Internet companies themselves.

If companies don’t follow through with this kind of censorship, they face the risk of being shut down, having servers seized, etc. Some have been shut down permanently in the past, and others have been shut down long enough that they lost most of their users anway.

"Sad story indeed," Kuo calls it.

As far as the Google situation, "Google is going to have to shit or get off the pot," says Kuo. "The ball is very much in Google’s court right now." Bejing realizes it has nothing to gain by pushing Google on the issue or being openly hostile towards the company, he says.

This week, Chinese Minister of Industry and Information Technology Li Yizhong reportedly had this to say: "I hope that Google will abide and respect the Chinese government’s laws and regulations. But, if you betray Chinese laws and regulations, it means that you are unfriendly, irresponsible, and you will have to pay the consequences." He also said, "What needs to be shut down will be shut down, what needs to be blocked will be blocked."

Kuo says this is just more of the same stuff we’ve been hearing from China for the last 2 months.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said, "Something will happen soon." Days ago, Google gave a congressional testimony saying they still intend to stop censoring results, but as Kuo notes, shutting down Google.cn would be a very involved process with large logistical challenges.

Stay tuned to WebProNews.com for more SXSW Interactive coverage as the event continues into next week. Watch for live streaming interviews with industry professionals at live.webpronews.com.