Now it appears they’re testing combining the related post results into a “Get more discussion results” link, like this:

It will be interesting to see if Google will roll out this feature – personally I don’t think it is any better than the existing snippet.

As you can see it brings back the UK domain however the text appears to be in Spanish. Not sure why this has happened. Anyone else spotted anything strange in relation to Google this morning.

Since then Google launched a limited version of Street View (in early 2009) and last week it rolled out Street View for the whole of the UK (well, 95%).

Street View still remains deeply controversial, with privacy groups concerned about the ‘intrusion’ from Google. An article by the Telegraph cites a recent survey which revealed that 24% of people (of the 11 thought the service was nothing more than “a service for burglars”.

When Google released the latest imagery I was interested to see if it would have captured me as I had seen the car. Unfortunately it’s only my back, but I am on Street View!

Tom has also found himself chasing the Google car:

These guys in scuba gear chasing the Google car were obviously prepared… not sure why they have an umbrella by their deckchairs though…

View Larger Map

The full report is yet to be released, but there have already been some interesting conclusions drawn from the data.
Bearing in mind the origin of the funding for this project, it’s likely to have a certain bias, and highlight the benefits of spending more on a non-Google search engine.The research suggests that you can roughly pigeon-hole people based on their search engine preference.

“Consumer preference for a specific train [search path] demonstrates a unique demographic and psychographic profile … The search experience on different search engines yields different results, with some being more relevant to the consumer than others. [This] contributes to overall customer and brand awareness. If the results of the search satisfy the needs of the consumer, then the search engine has greater appeal to that potential customer and he or she will have a deeper connection to the brand and the search engine. Therefore, the research indicates, search engines provide different degrees of a “brand lift” to the destination site.”

I have to say, this is an ambitious statement to make, because it assumes that you can group people into just 3 different user types based on what could potentially be the search engine that was set as the homepage on their PC. They go on to segment by industry, giving different conversion rates for Google/Yahoo/Bing users for certain brands, products and services.

So far, the data that comes into the main focus regards conversion rates for the various verticals, but the snippets of the results are so specific to brand, that we will have to wait for the full report to be released to come to any actionable conclusions.

For the original press release : Research by Wunderman Finds Link Between Brand Building and Search Engine Use By Consumers

An example taken from the Google blog is below:

The above example shows how potentially useful Browser Size could be in determining the best positioning for important information or purchase links. The best value would be to owners of ecommerce websites, to ensure the maximum amount of visibility is achieved for users.

We ran the PushON blog through Google Browser Size:

The data shows that 90% of users are able to see the full width of the blog, and 90% can see the initial paragraph from the latest blog post. For a blog, the articles are the key information you want to get across to your users, so 90% visibility for the first post is a nice statistic.

Minor changes to the positioning of items can make quite a huge difference, as Google provide an example of increased downloads:

…on the download page for Google Earth, the install rate increased by 10% when we moved the “Download” button 100 pixels upward. We can attribute that increase to users who wanted to try out Google Earth, but didn’t see the button before.

Want to try Browser Size out for yourself? Head over to the following link:
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

If you receive an email asking you to verify that your adverts are running, check the link it points to – as it’s more than likely an attempt to gain access to your account.

Here’s the email that’s doing the rounds at the moment:

Be careful with email, because it’s very easy to fake the sender address, so if any of the companies that you normally deal with emails to prompt you to log in – then visit the site direct rather than clicking on an email link.  It’s one extra step, but it’s a habit that may save you a huge amount of hassle in future.

It has been unclear as to why Google as taken so long to release the feature as its been one of the most requested by SEO’s in recent years. Up until this point we have had to make do with alternatives such as GA Notes. GA Notes is a plugin for Firefox and in fairness does an ok job. The main drawback to it however is that you can’t view the notes on multiple computers. So for example if you add some notes at home you are not then able to see them at work.

It’s clear that Google has taken this issue into consideration when developing there version as they provide this functionality. Anyone with access to an account can add notes and they can be made either private or public. This is ideal as sometimes you wont want to share certain things with clients however its great that they will be able to see when key changes are made.

Google analytics annotations is also going to be a feature that will greatly appeal to large corporations. More and more big corporations are using Google analytics but with so many different departments workings on a site it can be difficult to track things. Annotations will allow people in different departments to see when different things occured and how they effected the site. It will acts as a type of central repository.

Anyway instead of me banging on about it i will leave it to the guys at Google to explain it in this hand video.

For a long time searches for music and bands has bought up fan sites which give little information for people searching directly for songs or albums. For example many people will be looking for a new album by a band they like but not necessarily know the name of that album. Trying to find that new album would be difficult with the current set-up as users would have to click through several pages on a site. This is not ideal as users want information quickly and easily.

The new service will display a thumbnail, background info, review links and most importantly a preview button. This will allow people to listen to short extracts of music and then have the option to purchase that music. Of what i have read users should be able to buy from other services including ITunes. This will be an important inclusion as Google won’t want to be seen as being unfair. Also Itunes has a huge user base.

Of course we will be able to see just how the service will work on wednesday and it should hopefully transform the way we find out about music on Google.

Just leave a comment below (with your correct Gmail address and also your Twitter name) to enter. We will announce the winner at 3pm (UK Time) today.

Get two entries if you retweet my message on Twitter

Competition now closed – Winner was Dan Alderson

Google is launching Google Wave soon.  This is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web using HTML 5.  They are encouraging developers to get involved before the official launch so they have further examples of applications ready for the roll out.

But will it solve the ongoing debate about whether you follow an email tread with your reply at the top like Outlook, or at the bottom like in forums… or will it just add a third option to confuse us all and start the next argument?