Google giving up on Wave, Knol and Friend Connect

Google keeps whittling down its projects, narrowing the focus of the company's efforts behind Chief Executive Larry Page's push to put "more wood behind fewer arrows."

The latest trimming will eliminate seven Google products: Bookmarks Lists, Friend Connect, Gears, Search Timeline, Wave, Knol and the ambitious project Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal.

"We're in the process of shutting a number of products which haven't had the impact we'd hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path forward," Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president of operations, said in a company blog post.  "Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience."

Here's the rundown on each discontinued product from Hölzle's post:

Google Buzz introduced to Gmail

We've blogged before about our thoughts on the social web, steps we've taken to add social features to our products, and efforts like OpenSocial that propose common tools for building social apps. With more and more communication happening online, the social web has exploded as the primary way to share interesting stuff, tell the world what you're up to in real-time and stay more connected to more people. In today's world of status messages, tweets and update streams, it's increasingly tough to sort through it all, much less engage in meaningful conversations.

Our belief is that organizing the social information on the web — finding relevance in the noise — has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google's experience in organizing information can help solve. We've recently launched innovations like real-time search and Social Search, and today we're taking another big step with the introduction of a new product, Google Buzz.

Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting

Google Ditches Local Listings for SEOs and Designers - By Chris Crum

Reference: http://www.webpronews.com/

As 2009 came to a close, Google managed to get SEOs riled up for one last controversial topic. For some time, SEOs and web designers have been noticing that Google has not been showing local listings in search results for queries related to their businesses - even location-specific ones.

Should SEOs and designers be worried about local listings?

As Matt McGee mentions in a Search Engine Land piece, even a query like "candy" without any geographical indicator will bring up a seven-pack of local results, but a query for "seo" or "web design" or even something as specific as "web design vancouver" will bring up no local listings whatsoever (although the organic results still heavily favor local businesses in location-specific queries).

 

Needless to say, some SEOs and designers are taking this as something of a slap in the face, justified or not. Search engine optimization and web design are both services after all, and just about every other type of service you can think of will yield local listings in a Google search.

What Google's Real-Time Search Means to SEO, PPC & Reputation Management - By Chris Crum

Reference: http://www.webpronews.com/

It seems that over the course of the entire year, we've been waiting for Google to get real-time search. Now it's here. If you have ever had a hard time finding a direct relationship between social media and search engine marketing, it doesn't get any more direct than this. Real-time search results (from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other sources) right in regular SERPs.

While "real-time search" has certainly been a buzzword this year, the concept itself has been around for a while longer in some capacity. Sure, the concept of searching Twitter has been around for quite some time now, but even as far as Google is concerned, freshness has been a factor of great interest.

"Google has been working on real-time search for years," as Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb points out. "In the spring of 2006, the story goes, Google launched Google Finance onto the Web and was promptly dismayed to find that the service didn't appear in a Google search for its own name later that day. It was after that, and a few other similar experiences, that Google engineers created an algorithm called QDF, or Query Deserves Freshness. QDF determines when results for a query need to be augmented with the newest content available, in addition to the content with the highest PageRank."

Things to Consider if Page Speed is to Become a Ranking Factor By Chris Crum

Reference: http://www.webpronews.com/

About a month ago, WebProNews interviewed Google's Matt Cutts, who suggested that page speed may soon become a ranking factor in the world's most popular search engine. Speed has been a consistent theme with the company over the past year or so, with the release of various tools and announcements. It has become quite evident that Google places a great deal of importance on speeding up the web. With that in mind, it's not hard to see why Cutts' suggestion could soon become a reality. Google has always maintained that it is trying to deliver the best user experience, and by delivering results that load quickly users should get just that.

While many webmasters are embracing the notion of speed as a ranking factor as a welcome change, there are also plenty of people who do take issue with it for a variety of reasons. We've had some interesting comments from readers on the subject. Here are some of them:

So, we all have to pay for the most expensive hosting now or we won’t get found in search engines. I won’t be able to host on my own servers at work now. It went from paying for backlinks with huge advertising corporations to get sites PageRank up, Now we have to go with even bigger corporations that can afford to have a massive pipe connecting to the Internet. I don’t think Google mean to, but they are squeesing the poor people of the World out from search results and glorifying huge corporations – Be careful Google!