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The “conversational search” that Google demonstrated at last week’s Google I/O conference is now available to users of its Chrome browser, and it’s a significant leap in how we use search engines.

I’m 17 years now into writing about search, and I’ve seen all types of things that have promised to revolutionize the space, especially products that trot out words like “natural language” and “semantic search” but fail to deliver.

Conversational search has natural language, semantic search and...

Liat Ben-Zur wrote a great post for AllThingsD called Connecting Things to the Internet Does Not an Internet of Things Make. His main issue with the current crop of connected devices is lack of cross-platform integration:

Each specific device seems to connect to its particular cloud service. There isn’t really one cloud. Every manufacturer has their own cloud service, and often these clouds are closed, proprietary environments. Devices that live in their own siloed cloud cannot speak to...

As part of our coverage of the ten Google algorithm changes coming this summer, I wanted to make sure you all saw that Google was coming up with a technique to determine which sites are authorities in specific topics. Now, if Google determined...

There is a saying that Tim Mayer, formerly from Yahoo, brought to the SEO conferences that has been used for probably ten years now. He said, "don't bring a sword to a gun fight," when someone was talking about how some search results for very shady business areas were spamming but he was doing white hat SEO techniques and was getting no where...

Coming out of Google I/O at Moscone Center in San Francisco yesterday, I did a double-take. Was that Microsoft pitching its “Bing It On” challenge against Google directly across the street. Yep.



“Put the science back in computer science: test your Google bias inside” read a big banner, over the entrance to the Metreon Mall, which is across from Moscone.

Inside, there’s a “Bing In On” kiosk:



One side is just an invitation to take the challenge; you actually do the challenge on...

Google was granted a patent this week that describes how web sites might be given quality ratings, based upon a model that looks at human ratings for a sample set of sites, and web site signals from those sites.

The patent tells us that the advantage of such an approach would be to: Provide [...]

The post How Google May Rank Web Sites Based on Quality Ratings appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

Want to have your company logo appear in Google search results similar to how authors get to have their pictures displayed? Google’s now announced support for that through “organization markup.” But it’s not quite the “publishership” that some have been expecting.

Google explains its post today that Schema.org organization markup can be used to do this to have a preferred logo appear in its results, saying: A business whose homepage is www.example.com can add the following markup using...