Ever wondered how Google’s search works? The company launched a new website Friday, appropriately called How Search Works, to give you a behind-the-scenes look at the process from start to finish.

“Here you can follow the entire life of a search query, from the web, to crawling and indexing, to algorithmic ranking and serving, to fighting webspam,” Google Product Manager Jake Hubert said in a blog post announcing the page.

“The site complements existing resources, including this blog [Google’s Inside Search blog], the help center, user forums, Webmaster Tools, and in-depth research papers. We hope the site helps to illuminate the split-second journey from algorithms to answers,” he added.

On the site you can check out an animated explanation of search, as well as take a closer look at Google’s major search algorithms and features. A live slideshow gives you a glimpse at how Google removes spam, and complementing graphs show the spam problem and how Google is fighting it.
Search enthusiasts can also read an included 43-page document on how Google evaluates its search results.

You can check out How Search Works here.



Image courtesy of Flickr, Robert Scoble; Screenshot courtesy of Google































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Chelsea P. Gladden is the Director of Marketing & PR for FlexJobs, an award-winning service that helps job-seekers find professional opportunities that also offer work flexibility, such as telecommuting, freelance, part-time or alternative schedules. To learn more about Chelsea, visit FlexJobs.com or tweet her @FlexJobsChelsea.

If you’re like millions of Americans looking for a job right now, it might be time to take a step back and evaluate your job-search tactics. There are some common mistakes that can make you your own worst enemy when trying to get your foot in the door of a new employer. To give your employment search some performance enhancement, make sure to follow these tips.

1. Early Bird Gets the Worm

The sooner you get your job application in, the better luck you will have at getting your resume seen. If you are slow to reply to a job listing, you likely will lose your shot at be considered, so make sure to stay up-to-date on new listings as they arise.

2. Get a Jump-Start

Even better than being one of the first to apply for an open position is seeking one out before it is posted. Research the companies you are interested in working for and reach out to see if any openings are on the horizon. Interact with the company on LinkedIn, join the same local trade organizations the company attends and find out where their staff members might be speaking publicly. Consider volunteering at events the company may be involved with to start to get to know the staff and familiarize yourself with the company culture.

3. Tailor Your Information

Applying for jobs can often be a numbers game, so once you have narrowed down the best fits for you, make sure you customize your resume and cover letter for each position you apply for. Though you will want to be one of the first to apply, don’t be in such a rush that you automatically eliminate yourself by not indicating how your skills are a match for a specific position and how you meet that particular’s company's requirements. Not showing you are a fit for that specific job will surely end your chances of being considered.

4. Follow Up

Though it may feel like you are sending your information into a large black abyss at times, there are people on the other end. It’s perfectly acceptable — even preferred — to send a follow-up email if you don't get a response within a couple of days. This is when you confirm that the interviewer received your information, giving you a chance to reiterate your interest in the job. But, if a listing specifically states "no phone calls or emails," abide by that request or you may end your chances. Once you have landed the interview, absolutely follow up with your interviewers through a thank-you note, again expressing your interest in the company and the job.

If you feel like your job search is at a standstill, be sure to reevaluate how you are going about it. After all, we all could use a little performance enhancement from time to time.
























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Facebook is still the largest social network with over 1.06 billion people logging in every month. Remember that is not registered users who have created an account but people who do go and check their Facebook profile every 30 days.

Facebook has reached a saturation point in most developed and English speaking countries. This is because they have run out of people to connect to their network who are not already users.

This becomes more obvious when you look at the fact that 82% of their monthly active users come from outside the USA and Canada.

Growth for Facebook in the future will come from developing and non English speaking countries.

Facebook is a mobile company

The growth of smart phones has had a significant impact on Facebook. This led to Facebook making the acquisition of the mobile app company Instagram for a breathtaking $1 billion.

This came from the realisation that they needed mobile traction and fast.

The following statement from Mark Zuckerberg which precedes the latest announcement of Facebook’s fourth quarter and full financial year results, shows how important they consider mobile in their future.

“In 2012, we connected over a billion people and became a mobile company,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO.”

It also led to the focus on development and launchof Facebook for Android 2.0, completely rebuilt to deliver improved stability and faster performance and opened Facebook Messenger to anyone with a telephone number.

What is also significant is that these latest figures show that mobile advertising is now 23% of advertising revenue which is up from 14% a year ago.

Facebook is making progress on mobile.

Significant moment

The web is driven by two major factors and they both start with an “S”

• Search
• Social

Facebook launched Graph Search Beta (a significant moment), a structured search tool that enables users for the first time to find people, places, photos and other content that has been shared on Facebook. This recent announcement is important because it puts Facebook on a collision course with Google.

Google with its Google+ platform launch is trying to become more social. Facebook with its launch of “Graph search” is  wanting to make search more relevant for its social network users.

Both of these events will have significant impact on the evolution of the social web.

The Facts and Figures

1. Monthly active users were 1.06 billion as of December 31, 2012, (an increase of 25% from last year)
2. Daily active users were 618 million on average for December 2012, (an increase of 28% since 2011)
3. Mobile monthly active users were 680 million as of December 31, 2012, (increase of 57% year-over-year)
4. Mobile daily active users exceeded web users for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2012
5. Mobile revenue represented approximately 23% of advertising revenue for the fourth quarter of 2012, up from approximately 14% of advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2012
6. Revenue for the fourth quarter totaled $1.585 billion, an increase of 40%, compared with $1.13 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011.
7. Revenue from advertising was $1.33 billion, representing 84% of total revenue and a 41% increase from the same quarter last year.
8. Payments and other fees revenue for the fourth quarter was $256 million.
9. The music trivia game SongPop was the crowd favorite during 2012 (thankfully not Farmville), with social mobile games Dragon City and Bike Race coming in at second and third.
10. The number of Facebook employees stood at 4,619 as of December 31, 2012

Source: Facebook

What About You?

Do any of these facts surprise you? What are other facts you would like to find out about Facebook?

Where do you think Facebook is heading and will it challenge Google in the future?

Look forward to your comments and feedback.






































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Before today, when you typed an equation into Google — say, “15 x 7″ — the answer (105, if you must know) would appear in bold above you actual search results. Now Google has gone one step further, giving you your answer on a virtual calculator.

The blue-hued calculator appears above your results, as before, and has 34 buttons, including standard trigonometric functions, exponents and buttons for the transcendental numbers, pi and e.

Bonus: It also works on mobile. In our quick test, it appeared in both Safari and Chrome on iOS and of course on Android as well. Although the scientific functions aren’t visible in portrait mode, they appear when you flip your phone to landscape — a trick Google’s borrowing from the iOS-standard calculator.
Punching buttons is a little unwieldy in the desktop browser, but it’s natural as can be on a phone. Plus, on both versions, you can do calculations via voice search. The voice interface can even discern such phrasing as “cosine of 60 degrees.”

It’s not the first time Google has experimented with interactive calculators in its search tool. A Google Doodle late last year that celebrated the 60th anniversary of Stanislaw Lem’s first book featured a robot whose chest featured a calculator, although it was very limited and somewhat unreliable.





































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Appearing on the first page of a Google search can be the difference between the success or the failure of your business
.
The smart business owners and the savvy operators of eCommerce stores know that the free traffic delivered by search engines is worth gold to a business.
Research shows that ranking first on Google produces over 40 percent of all clicks to websites. Listing on the first page of a search, results in over 90 percent of all clicks. Now that is important in a digital economy!
Also a Google search can produce a negative or positive impression about a brand depending on what content and links appear in the search results. So online reputation management is also an important activity.
For a long time, Search Engine Optimization and Online Reputation Management have been looked upon as two parallel services. Google recently has changed how it performs its search. These updates to the search engine algorithms were titled “Panda” and the most recent changes were called “Penguin“.
So with these changes where does the future of both these services lie?
Let’s breakdown each of the services.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

When SEO started, it was easy to do. There were guaranteed success methods and approaches such as the following produced great results.

• Keyword density
• Meta tags
• Content

There were sites which went up overnight by acquiring links from questionable sources. Spamming an important keyword on the page was a very likely affair. People posted articles on blog networks, with each topic as unrelated as chalk and cheese!
The creation of low-quality, thin content was an easy option for a lot of people who were trying to gain success overnight! This list can go on and on!
Anything that is abused over time is likely to burn out. And so did these practices!

Google Wants Quality Content

Google’s Panda update was aimed at providing more relevant and quality content to users. This update was rolled out in the USA in February 2011, with various refreshes and updates over the course of the next 16 months. Panda 3.8 was released in the end of June 2012. While webmasters were still trying to come to terms with the Panda update (about 11.8% of all searches were affected with the first update.)
Google recently rolled out the Penguin update (about 3.1% of all search queries were affected). This update was aimed at keeping a check on

• Link schemes
• Exact anchor text linking
• Blog networks
• Duplicate content etc

Here is a great infographic comparing Google’s Panda and Penguin updates and how they affect your Brand’s visibility to the Google search engine.

Infographic  by Reload Media – Difference between Google Penguin & Panda

Content Marketing is Vital to SEO

Post these two updates, the SEO world has started viewing the terms ‘content’ and ‘links’ differently. For an SEO guy, content started focusing more on pieces that were not only unique and engaging but also something that a user could associate with!
Content Marketing became a term that every SEO expert started relating with more closely!
SEO agencies have started rolling out extensive content marketing plans for their clients, focusing on the creation of detailed content plans including the following

• Blogs
• PDF documents
• Whitepapers,
• eBooks,
• Presentations,
• Image syndication

You name a medium, and they have targeted it! SEO started focusing strongly on content marketing, wherein content marketing has become the crux of any SEO campaign.

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

ORM is one of the most dynamic activities online and one of the most difficult too. It is the only activity where you have little or no control over different situations and/or circumstances which can completely turn around all the hard work invested into a campaign!
An outsider speaking about your brand, the brand’s offline activities, and the actions of an important entity associated with the brand, all these can completely change the statistics of your campaign overnight! Positive mentions, neutral mentions and negative mentions! These more or less rule the life of that person who is trying to protect your online reputation.
Let’s run through the aim of any ORM campaign:

• Ensure that the client get as much positive exposure as possible. Try and get as many positive mentions up in the top 10/20/30 results!
• If it isn’t positive, ensure that you have neutral content about your brand!
• Neutralize the NEGATIVE content pieces!!!!

The easiest way to go about doing this is to ensure that you have positive/neutral content online talking about your brand. (Not that it is easy to do that!)
Also, since you work closely with the brand, you become the official channel of sorts, responsible for creating content and syndication across mediums and platforms! The content creation involves having an exhaustive content plan in place and using various mediums including videos, blogs, articles, etc.

Does this Sound Similar to SEO?

The lines distinguishing both these services are becoming less distinct by each passing day. The objective of both SEO and ORM now align towards the creation of good, unique and engaging content. Content marketing remains the focus of both services. Reaching out to new people, gaining greater visibility and creating a stronger brand presence are extremely important. The principle of SEO is now to ensure that not only is your brand reaching out to more people but also focus on creating a strong brand presence online.

SEO is Now Part of Brand Building

Brand building is becoming a more integral part of SEO activity! ORM has by principle always concentrated on promoting the brand!
It seems that a new service package offering Branding + SEO + ORM is the call of the hour. Anyone who has an online store, not only wants to increase their presence and standing, but also wants to ensure that their brand is being recognized by their target audience. It is essentially the first step to become a major player and stand out in a many player market! I can guarantee that this will not only be used by the big fish who are well established and will rely more on the monitoring and the reputation side of things but also by the small startups looking for a strong branding campaign to promote themselves and garner greater visibility!
Is Branding + Search Engine Optimization + Online Brand Monitoring & Online Reputation Management the next big thing? Thoughts?
Author: This post is written by Anindita Debnath, who works with Convonix as a Project Manager – SEO. She manages a big team of SEO professionals handling a substantial number of campaigns collectively. Apart from this, she takes up the responsibility of training fresh recruits and ushering them into the ever-evolving world of SEO.



































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