Google and Motorola Mobility

The $12.5 billion buyout is still being reviewed by the European Commission, with the deadline for a final decision being the 10th January, 2012. It is also being reviewed by the U.S. Department of Justice, and other relevant bodies. In the meantime, market watchers and tech lovers alike are already making predictions about what the transaction means. Whereas some see it as a good move, others are sceptical about Google’s underlying intentions.

At the moment, the Google is by far the most popularly used search engine. By buying Motorola Mobility, the internet giant could soon extend its dominance to the video solutions and home device markets. Furthermore, it will gain unprecedented control over how Android is developed, and accessed.

Many speculate that the foremost benefit to Motorola so far is protection from what Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page referred to in the release as “anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.” Whether or not it will work is yet to be seen since the deal is not yet finalized. However, it is clear that the ongoing patent battles between Motorola and its competitors could get more interesting.

If the intentions laid out in the press release are adhered to, consumers and other companies that manufacture Android devices will benefit from the move. Unfortunately, the deal does give Google a tremendous amount of power, and fears of favouritism have been expressed since it was revealed.

With only weeks away from the 10^th January, people are watching to see whether the sale will be allowed or rejected. Should the decision be in Google’s favour, what happens after will depend on a number of factors. Onlookers can merely speculate about the specifics, but clearly an acceptance of the deal will make way for some major changes through-out the mobile solutions industry.

Getting your website seen is undoubtedly the most crucial part of having a business website online. If you intend on doing a lot of hard marketing and intend to gain traffic in the short and long term solely by these methods and links from other websites, then you can just concentrate on getting your website looking and functioning the way that you desire.

However, if you are someone that wants to make the most of the online traffic that is available, then there are a few boxes that need to be ticked. Most importantly, can your website be found and read by the search engines? Many websites have features in place that can reduce your website’s visibility or, in some cases, eliminate its visibility altogether.

The first thing to consider is what words or phrases should bring searchers to your website; these words are your ‘keywords’. Carry out thorough keyword research before making any changes to your website the following article will help you to choose keywords with commercial value to your business; Target Keywords with Commercial Value. Once you are happy with the chosen keywords ensure that they appear in important sections of your website such as;

Meta Tags
Whilst viewing your website, click view from the browser menu then view ‘Page Source’, you should find Meta Tags located between the HEADER tags (). These are the primary points for search engines to read and establish a page’s readability and contents value to its users.

Robots
The ‘robots’ Meta Tags can instruct the search engines whether or not to read the content. If this Tag does not exist within the website code, then the default ‘index and follow’ applies. If this Tag is present with content such as “no index” or “no follow”, then this particular page will restrict search engines ability to view and index your content.

Title
This is not an actual Meta Tag, but is closely associated and so is treated like one by many designers and internet marketers. The title, located between the TITLE Tags (), will appear within the tab of the webpage when opened. The title is easily edited, but some companies choose to just fill these with words such as “home page” or “about us”, which is not very descriptive to the search engines, and can increase the difficulty in getting your website promoted through the search results. A better option is to use words or phrases relating to your website i.e. keywords that you wish to be found for on search engines. Ensure that the keywords are both relevant to your content and that they also appear in your content; this will help you to rank higher for relative keywords on search engines.

Description
The description tag (“description”) works on two fronts. Firstly it is used for the search engines to better understand the content of a page; secondly it is used as the paragraph which will be displayed in the search results. A lot of thought needs to be put into this section, firstly, to ensure that is it descriptive as well as inviting to visitors to increase the clicks through to your website.

Flash versus XHTML

Flash can not exist on a website without HTML or XHTML, so there is not an actual Flash-only choice. However with websites primarily using flash for a website, the content can be unreadable and so will not do well when trying to rank in the search engines. There are tools available that allow you to see what the search engines see, a good and free tool to use is Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer which can be downloaded at Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer.

It is recommended to have an XHTML site that has small sections of flash content embedded. This allows you to benefit from the visual appeal of flash but benefit from optimised content from the XHTML to increase the traffic to your website.

Within an XHTML website, there any many factors that attribute a readable site, such as limited or no use of tables and inline frames (iframes). This does get technical and can become very complicated. In its simplicity the less code-to-content ratio, the better; but it is advisable to contact a professional SEO Company/designer to establish the quality of the website code.

Google have announced changes to their search engine that will enable AJAX content to become crawlable. No more choosing between a search engine friendly website and dynamic content, now you can use practicality and SEO to get the best of both worlds with your website.

More and more Web 2.0 social websites are appearing on the Internet, and most content for these sites is dynamic. Because AJAX content failed to be crawled by search engines, this has been restricting developers from developing better AJAX apps and slowing down the progression of website features. I know what its like sitting there trying to develop a website while attempting to perform your clients’ requests and create what is ultimately the best coding solution, but being held up by the implications your work will have on the SEO of a website … frustrating times. Trying to find a work-around can double your workload, but slowly Google is knocking down the barriers that restrict us from doing things the way we want to.

“Today we’re excited to propose a new standard for making AJAX-based websites crawlable. This will benefit webmasters and users by making content from rich and interactive AJAX-based websites universally accessible through search results on any search engine that chooses to take part. We believe that making this content available for crawling and indexing could significantly improve the web.” quoted from googleblog.

This will mean those people who have applied AJAX to their sites, with dynamic content, will need to re-evaluate the content contained within. If you have not optimised the content contained with now is the time people, before it gets picked up and either dilutes or otherwise negatively affects your SEO campaign. This change does work out well considering that “almost 70% of the websites we know about use JavaScript in some form or another. Of course, most of that JavaScript is not AJAX, but the better that search engines could crawl and index AJAX, the more that developers could add richer features to their websites and still show up in search engines.”

While applying this feature, Google are trying to achieve the following:

• Minimal changes are required as the website grows
• Users and search engines see the same content (no cloaking)
• Search engines can send users directly to the AJAX URL (not to a static copy)
• Site owners have a way of verifying that their AJAX website is rendered correctly and thus that the crawler has access to all the content

Happy coding!

Online coverage of the so called ‘Google V’s Bing’ war of the search engine’s has been incessant to say the very least. The Gadget show recently featured a compelling battle between Microsoft’s ‘new kid on the block’ and Google’s ‘Old Faithful’. Suzi Perry favored Google’s multiple applications while fellow presenter Ortis Deley chose Bing and then was able to use any application other than Google in the second and third rounds.

Suzi states that ‘even her Mum and Cat are able to use Google’ while Ortis comes back with the fact that ‘people only use Google because they are unaware of smaller yet potentially better websites’.

Round 1 – Masterfind

The first round starts with a ‘Mastermind’ style quiz, using the search engines to find the answers as quickly as possible.

With Jon Bentley firing the questions, Suzi steps up armed with a laptop and Google’s mammoth index, before being followed by Ortis using Bing;

Q1. What’s the weather in London today?

Suzi: Google confirms the weather instantly with its own Weather application.

Ortis: Bing also returns an instant correct forecast with results from FORECA

Q2. What is the population of Rome?

Suzi: Again Suzi is presented with an instant and accurate figure of 2,656,000

Ortis: Bing drops points here with an outdated 2005 consensus figure of 2,553,873

Q3. Does the popular character Hello Kitty have any siblings?

Suzi: Google’s deep links instantly reveal that the character has a twin sister Mimmy.

Ortis: Like Google, Bing showed the ‘Hello Kitty’ site with deep links but not as the first result, the results were confused by images and sponsored links which slowed Ortis down, though he eventually found the right answer.

Q4. What’s the weather forecast for London tomorrow?

Both Bing and Google presented instant result showing the correct forecast again.

Q5. Which country won the women’s world cup championship in 1999?

Suzi: Google’s handy timeline option took Suzi directly to the information showing the winners to be the U.S.A.

Ortis: Unfortunately, due to being held up on question 3, Ortis ran out of time and therefore could not answer the last question.

The first round leaves Google one nil up, however having carried out these searches myself using both Google and Bing alongside each other at the following website www.bing-vs-google.com, the results I found where very similar. Give it a go yourselves and let me know your results.

Round 2 – The Gadget Maze

This is where things started to get a lot more interesting for me with Google taking on the rest of the net in a two part thriller, Suzi claims that Google’s mammoth collection of software and applications can solve every task you can think of whilst Ortis asks the question ‘Is Google a jack of all trades and master of none?

In this part of round 2 Suzi and Ortis are locked into a Crystal Maze style cell and handed a list of items to find. The objective of this was to purchase the items at the cheapest price including delivery in the quickest time possible.

Suzi uses Google Products but finds that many of the items are out of stock and only presented in Dollars. This increases the time needed to find each item and work out the price and means that Suzi only manages to find three products out of five in the allotted time.

Ortis comes up trumps this time; spoilt, for choice between Kelkoo and Foundem before settling with Pricerunner. Pricerunner uses real people to research products and displays prices that include delivery which definitely gave Ortis the edge. Ortis manages to purchase all five items with all but one being cheaper than Suzy’s.

Ortis pulls one back for the rest of the net, could Ortis be right in stating that Google may be a jack of all trades but master of none, I think Google has a one or two things mastered to be fair.

The next part of round 2 is about photo editing and sharing; both presenters are given a photograph that is less than perfect with things like blur and red eye ruining the shot. This part of the battle puts Google’s Picassa up against the increasingly popular Flickr.

The most obvious difference between these two is the fact that Picassa is PC based so you have to download the software on to your computer before using it while Flickr is a web based application. These differences meant that Suzi was able to get straight to business by simply opening her image in Picassa and starting the edits.

Ortis however had to upload his image to Flickr, which took a couple of minutes, before he could start the editing process. With Picassa the red eye removal was effective enough and easy to achieve however although the usability was simple, the resulting contrast and sharpness wasn’t great with improvements barely noticeable.

Flickr’s editing ability shone through with simple easy to use controls and outstanding performance that made drastic improvements to the image. All they had left to do was to share the image online, due to Flickr being web based this was a really quick process and publishing was nearly instantaneous while Suzi had to wait for a nervous few minutes before being able to upload the image and complete the task.

Ortis’s image edited by Flickr was a far greater improvement but Picassa just didn’t have anywhere near the same effect showing Flickr to be the master in this department. Round 2 showed that specialist software such as Flickr and Pricerunner clearly has the edge over Google in the image and shopping markets.

Round 3 – Treasure Hunt

This round was based on a Treasure Hunt style search through Birmingham’s City Centre with Suzi again relying on Google and Ortis using the rest of the webs software. The idea was that Suzi and Ortis had to guide a runner through the streets of Birmingham from a static position via a mobile phone connection. Suzi drops on with none other than Treasure Hunt’s Anneka Rice as her runner while Ortis isn’t too displeased with presenter and marathon runner Angelika Bell on his team.

Various clues where placed at locations throughout Birmingham and early indications showed Suzi to have the upper hand.

For this navigational challenge Ortis chose Multi Map to guide Angelica with Suzi opting to use Google Maps combined with Google Latitude to guide Anneka. Google Latitude gave Suzi a great advantage as this software allows users to track friends, with their permission, using a smart phone. This allowed Suzi to see exactly where Anneka was in relation to the target location, she then paired this with Google Streets so that she could see exactly what Anneka could see.

Using Multi Map Ortis was able to guide Angelika to each clue but the communication was difficult without viewing her exact location or seeing buildings and landmarks as Angelica saw them. One of the clues was in French which Suzi easily and accurately translated using Google’s quick translation tool, on the other hand Ortis got a slightly confused translation from Yahoo’s Babel Fish service which slowed Angelica down.

When it came down to navigation and maps Google seems way ahead of the competition and Suzi easily guided Anneka to the finish line ahead of Angelica.

I thought this would be a great article to share with you; I really enjoyed the show and writing this article whilst carrying out a few of the tests myself.

I’ve tried a few different search terms and in all honesty couldn’t pick between the two when it came to results and speed of results in the first round. With all these challenges the user’s ability to use the correct terminology to search paired with the amount of knowledge and experience they have using the software does have a big part to play in the outcome.

I felt that the second round was far more conclusive and gave a far better indication of how good some of the available software and applications are. In the third and final test Google really stood out with some excellent navigational tools which I too have played about with, I’m sure there are some great business and personal uses for all of these applications.

I’d be really interested to hear about your results when comparing the two and will keep you informed as and when the comments come back, thanks for reading.