New Google Translation Tools: Edit Text, Change Language & Hear Translation Directly Within Search

Google has added new translation features, making it easy to edit translation search terms, change languages or hear the translations directly within search.

Going off a tip from @WilliamHarvey, when searching the word “translate,” Google now delivers a quick search option for entering text or choosing the translation language via a dynamic knowledge graph box as shown in this screen shot:

Once a full translation search query has been entered, Google offers both the text translation or the option to hear the audio version of the translated word or phrase.

“It is indeed a new feature with added translate tools directly within search,” confirmed a Google spokesperson, “You can say ‘translate where is the closest museum into French’ and you can now edit the text, change the input and output languages, and hear the translation spoken back to you more than once.”

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Google’s Matt Cutts Regrets Not Acting Faster On Paid Links & Content Farms

In Google’s Matt Cutts latest video, he answers a question I personally asked about what he regrets, what decision he regrets making in the past related to webspam. My question specifically was:

Was there a key moment in your spam fighting career where you made a mistake that you regret, related to spam?

Matt answered it in than four minutes explained he regrets not acting sooner on (1) paid links and (2) content farms.

Google’s Paid Links Regret

Matt explained that several years ago at a search conference in San Jose, a well-known SEO told him that paid links are too common and there are no ways for Google to fight against it. That is when Matt said he realized that Google has made a mistake and they allowed paid links that passed PageRank to go too far. So in 2005 or so, Google cracked down heavily on paid links and now at this point, Matt said “most people” realize paid links are against Google’s guidelines, possibly against the FTC’s guidelines, that they have algorithms that fight against it and also manual actions around paid links. But Matt regrets not taking action sooner and waiting too long.

Google’s Content Farms Regret

The second regret Matt admitted to was around not acting sooner on content farms. Matt Cutts explained that early on, he did get some user complaints about the horrible user experience some of these content farms had. But when Matt himself went to one of the sites based on a search on how to fix a toilet in his home, he felt the user experience was good. He said he “over generalized” based on that one example, when he should have looked at the site overall and not just one page.

Because of that over generalization, Google didn’t act as fast as they should have on content farms and thus it became more of an issue on the web and for Google to deal with. Here Matt is specifically talking about Panda.

Matt did say that Google does do a lot of “great work” and finds it “rewarding” on the whole. But at the same time, he said he always “wonders” if you could do better by acting one way or another.

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Google’s Matt Cutts April Fools Video: No We Won’t Stop Changing; While Shirt Constantly Changes

If you didn’t have enough April Fools day fun today, here is one more for you.

In today’s video from Matt Cutts, Matt answered a real question from Dave in the UK, who asked, “When will Google stop updating its search results?” The answer was never! And to prove his point, Matt animated his shirt to change different colors and then overlay flowers on top of the shirt.

I made an animated GIF image to show the various colors and tricks with the shirt but the video is below. In short, Google won’t stop changing, like Matt’s shirt that day.

Source - http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-april-fools-video-wont-stop-changing-shirt-constantly-changes-188184

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weet Showing How Google Itself Is A “Scraper Site” Goes Massively Viral

Perhaps it’s SEO’s “Oreo moment,” a tweet relating to search engine optimization that’s gained nearly as much attention as Oreo’s famous Super Bowl blackout tweet. But the subject was a perfect storm of goodness — a real-life example of Google doing the type of thing in search it seems to be telling others not to do.

Yesterday, the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts announced a new Google Scraper Report for publishers to use if they see a site that has copied or “scraped” its content and which outranks the publisher in Google searches.

That quickly brought up a number of people joking in various places about how Google itself borrows content from other sites to make the direct answers it displays in its own search results. But, no joke hit it as right as that from digital marketer Dan Barker on Twitter, who tweeted back to Cutts:

It was super clever. Barker did a search for what is a scraper site, which brought up Google’s own web definition at the top of the results. And that definition technically outranks the original source of the content, Wikipedia, which comes right below.

Google does link to Wikipedia in its excerpt, which is in keeping with how its other search results work and generally on the right side of the law, when these things have been challenged in various places. And by scraper site, Google’s really talking about sites that wholescale copy all of someone’s content, rather than aiming for a fair use excerpt.

But still, as Google has increased the amount of web definitions, direct answers andKnowledge Graph box answers that are drawn from the content of other sites, the tensions have been rising.

With regular search listings, Google typically showed enough information for a searcher to decide if they want to visit a website and, if so, they’d click through. But the changes over the past few years (which Bing also does) have been to provide actual answers drawn from sites, so that there’s no need to click through.

It’s a difficult balancing act, because there are good reasons why it makes more sense for Google (or Bing) to just show the direct answer of something, rather than having dozens of sites all fight to be number one for “What time is the Super Bowl,” as they do.

But, it’s also a fundamental change to the unwritten contract between search engines and publishers — that yes, search engines can build their “content” on the back of publisher content, but only if there’s a fair exchange of traffic.

Barker’s tweet is perhaps the biggest sign ever that publishers are feeling like the balancing act is tipping too much into Google’s side. I’ve never, in 18 years writing about search, seen such a response like this. Last year’s Oreo tweet, when the Super Bowl had a blackout, was a darling example of huge engagement.

That tweet, associated with a prime time event, has about 16,000 retweets as of today, over a year later. Barker’s tweet, not associated with any major sporting event and about an issue that’s usually only of concern to SEOs, is over 14,000 tweets as I write this — and over 12,000 favorites.

Source - http://searchengineland.com/google-scraper-tweet-185684

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Google Yanks Fake FBI Listing From Google Maps, Puts New Blocks In Place To Stop Further Abuse

In response to a string of cases where fake business/organization listings have been added to Google Maps, Google says it has removed those listings and put in place new hurdles to make it more difficult for this kind of abuse to get through its system.

This latest run of problems came to light about a week ago, when some users discovered they could use Google Map Maker to create fake businesses that would be verified via a phone call. In the beginning, many of the fake listings were harmless.

More recently, the same user took advantage of Map Maker tocreate fake FBI and Secret Service office listings using his own phone number, and even managed to intercept calls to both agencies. Both of those listings were created in close proximity to actual offices, adding to the confusion over which listing was real.

Google has now removed the fake FBI and Secret Service listings, as well as others that have been exposed over the past week.

In addition, contacts at the company tell us that they’ve put new restrictions in place that will make it more difficult for this kind of activity to produce a “live” place listing on Google Maps.

This is hardly the first time users have found a hole in Google’s systems that allowed the creation of fake business listings in Google Maps. More than five years ago, for example, Danny Sullivan wrote about being able to “hijack” Yahoo’s listing and changing the company name to Microsoft.

In this latest case, though, the timing is particularly bad since Google just released its new Google Maps product out of beta.

The hole actually involved Map Maker, Google’s product that allows for crowd-sourced improvements to Google Maps. Hundreds of thousands of edits over the years have helped improve Maps, but it was also still open to the kind of exploits that have been detailed over the past week.

Given the competitive nature of local search, it probably won’t be too long before we find out if Google’s new restrictions succeed in preventing more of this kind of abuse … or if users find other holes they can exploit.

Source - http://searchengineland.com/google-yanks-fake-fbi-listing-google-maps-puts-new-blocks-place-stop-abuse-185601

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Google AdWords Smart Annotations Test Continues To Roll Out

Google has been expanding testing for the new Smart Annotations over the past few weeks. Smart Annotations automatically pull information from an advertiser’s landing page in an additional line of text in their ads.

Google hasn’t made an official announcement, but AdWords reps have been reaching out to notify their clients of the roll-out. Nilaye Tharkar, head of search at Performics Canada, received a heads up at the end of January about Smart Annotations testing. Here’s an excerpt from that email:

While this added line is not clickable, we saw an average CTR improvement of 9% in our pilot.

The added line comes from data we find on the landing page; it comes from navigation categories that typically are on the left side of your page (but could be elsewhere, like along the top). We look for relevancy and then typically take them in order off the landing page; respecting any trademark claims we have on file.

We expect to make basic reporting available roughly 1 month after launching (earlier data would not be statistically significant), and as always there is an opt out procedure

In the screenshot above, the smart annotation is pulling the list of “Laptop Features” itemized about halfway way down the left navigation on that Best Buy landing page. Often, the annotation will include a list of brands, also pulled from the left nav, as in the example below forwarded by Tharkar.

However, in an example I found today, the smart annotation is pulling from footer content, and the user value is questionable. The colon after “Brands” in the annotation makes the listing particularly confusing.Here’s the footer information getting pulled into this smart annotation.

This format is still in a limited test phase, so we may see funky displays like this example to get ironed out.

Again, these extra lines of copy are getting pulled in automatically, so there is no action to take on the advertiser’s end except to opt-out if desired.

Source - http://searchengineland.com/google-adwords-smart-annotations-test-continues-roll-184941

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WhatsApp to offer voice svcs: Should telcos start sweating?

The world's biggest messaging service WhatsApp now plans to add voice calls to the application by the second quarter. With 450 million users across the globe, they have already made a hole in several telecom operator's revenue. Now, what impact will this added feature of voice calling have?

CNBC-TV18’s Menaka Doshi and Senthil Chengalvarayan spoke to Sanjay Kapoor, former CEO of Bharti Airtel , Jaideep Ghosh of KPMG and Prasanto Roy, editorial advisor, Cybermedia to find out their take on the matter

Below is a verbatim transcript of the interview

Menaka: What happens when WhatsApp launches voice services? How much of a dent could they potentially make for Indian telecom service provider revenues?

Ghosh: WhatsApp and similar applications have already made a dent in the SMS and the basic texting services globally as well as India. So, we have estimated that roughly the person-to-person text message market was about Rs 6,000 crore last year. We believe about Rs 1500 crore or 2000 crore is something, which probably was taken away by WhatsApp. Now, if voice calls are provided free-of-cost and voice is the main stay of Indian telecom operators business, in the medium-term it should impact to a large extent. Possibly, due to regulatory aspects, due to lower penetration of smart phone, it maybe limited in the near-term.

Menaka: What you are saying is that the Indian telecom service providers lost potentially Rs 2000 crore to WhatsApp in revenue last year?

Jaideep: Not only WhatsApp, but on the others as well.

Senthil: How serious a threat is this to voice calls because we have had Skype, others in the voice space?

Kapoor: Let's go step-by-step. There are three revenue streams that of messaging, that of value added services and that of voice which the operators as a fraternity globally have really not developed over past couple of decades and they have been milking these revenue streams. It's the over the top (OTT) players who have come and added value in many of these services and that's why there has been a attack from several OTT players on messaging, on value added services which have now become applications and now voice. Now obviously if somebody has paid USD 19 billion for WhatsApp, he has not paid it for messaging alone. He is going to develop that platform and put new services tomorrow and will have everything going including payments. Mobile commerce (M Commerce), voice because he has an access to 415 million active users and growing and therefore you will see an attract across the globe and not only Whatsapp other OTT players as well.

Menaka: What does it mean for telecom service providers like Bharti, Idea and Vodafone that will eventually lose potential revenue to players like WhatsApp? Can you quantify for me what kind of loss these players could possibly be staring at?

Kapoor: I can give you a very macro view. If you take globally, the trillions of dollars that operators make the value added services player which includes Google and others make about 6-7 percent of that and their dominance increases and as consumer pool and devices proliferate I think they have clearly a road map to move and chew more and more into the uncovered area.

So, that is the sort of potential they are sitting on. But, on the other side operators have to move in their mind set from voice to data and today about 85 percent of the revenue of all operators at an average comes from voice. The moment they start moving to data, you will see that voice will relegate itself to becoming another app. It's better that the operators do it than they get pushed towards it.

Menaka: We make it sound easy when we say Whatsapp will launch voice and that might take away traffic from the erstwhile players or telecom service providers in the country. But there are also regulatory issues to keep in mind. Recently our colleague Malvika spoke with the DoT secretary and he said he will look into the concerns that telecom operators have with regards to the fact they pay for the spectrum and license fee etc. but all of these OTT players don't have any of those regulatory expenses to deal with?

To breach the gap to around USD 20 which is assuming they will two billion users in terms of numbers, no reason why they shouldn't. That's not going to come from WhatsApp user fees. People were asking where they are going to make money from. I think this is going to be it and if you see what WhatApp has done to multimedia. You know people are very easily uploading lots of videos. There's a lots of pictures of course, lot of videos, which is shared among groups. Everytime you share a video in a group of 30-40 users that's that much of traffic.

Now, some of this has gone back to operators because people are ultimately using data traffic although they prefer to do heavy in WiFi but this is going to hit the operators hard and like Sanjay was saying its really up to them to anticipate that disruption and disrupt themselves rather then sit back and complain and wait for it to happen and then do something about it.

Senthil: The only argument against that is Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has been around for years so why should it be different this time? Is there any comfort in that?

Roy: VoIP has completely disrupted long distance traffic not so much based on the mobile but companies like VSNL here and then AT&T in the US they fought it and they finally had to join and at one point VSNL lost 40-50 percent of its revenues to various players for VoIP. On the mobile the thing is there hasn’t been a simple, fluid, easy way on a messaging app that people are used to. People are used to Skype and they are used to Skype on the PC. It was simply not easy enough to setup SIP and these apps which use SIP; there are lots of those apps. The difference this time is Whatsapp has a predominant base out there of people who are familiar with it. It is very easy to use, they are simple, focused, fast, it just simply works and if Facebook allows Whatsapp to keep that focus and I am really hoping it would then voice too is going to work as smoothly and easily. I think that is the difference. Using messaging app, just like if Facebook were able to take up a service it would be very different from small little apps trying to do it; that is the difference. I think the adoption will be very high. The trial will be very high so everybody is going to try it and they have very high engagement rate. 70 percent of those users come back everyday. This is serious stuff.

Menaka: From a consumer point of view I would not like for any regulatory interference in allowing for a Whatsapp voice call product release. Have you crunched any numbers on what impact this could potentially have on Indian telecom companies?

Ghosh: I don’t think we have estimated anything on the voice as such but let me also say that it is not that Indian telecom operators or worldwide telecom operators are coming to know of this like yesterday morning. Voice on messaging application has been there and operators have also been reasonably well prepared. So, if Facebook can acquire Whatsapp, the operators can also acquire someone similar or create it. So, the impact will be mitigated by counter strategies; that is something we should see in the near term.

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AdGooroo Adds Mobile Paid Search Spend Insights, Releases List Of Top Mobile Search Advertisers

Search marketing intelligence firm, AdGooroo announced it is the first to provide insights into search advertising spend on mobile devices. The new mobile search data is now included in the company’s SEM Insights Tool, starting with data from the U.S., U.K. and Australia.

Additional mobile insights now available include ad copy, impressions and clicks, click-through rates, costs-per-click at the campaign and keyword level.

AdGooroo has also released a list of the top 20 advertisers in mobile search by impressions in January 2014. The list is based on impressions from the top 50,000 keywords on Google AdWords in the U.S.

Amazon dominates as the number one search advertiser on both mobile and desktop. Walmart ranks number 2 on desktop, but barely squeaks into the top 20 on mobile, while JC Penney ranks number five on desktop search and is at just 29 in the list of mobile search advertisers.

iTunes and ActiveBeat, a health content provider, garnered more mobile search impressions than desktop impressions in January. Pizza Hut, Wells Fargo and Chase’s rankings reflect their investment in location-based mobile ad campaigns — search for “pizza” on your smartphone, and you’ll likely see an ad for Pizza Hut.

Source - http://searchengineland.com/adgooroo-adds-mobile-paid-search-spend-insights-releases-list-top-mobile-search-advertisers-185095

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Google To Look Into Movie Blogs Losing Traffic

About eight different movie blog sites, including Slashfilm.com, have apparently lost traffic in Google — and the issue is big enough that Google is looking into it.

The owner and editor of /Film called out to Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, about this issue on Saturday:

Peter Sciretta        ✔ @slashfilm

Follow

@mattcutts any ideas why so many movie blogs are losing more than half their google traffic this past month? Very troubling.

2:57 AM - 22 Feb 2014

1 RETWEET 3 FAVORITES

Cutts replied:

Matt Cutts        ✔ @mattcutts

Follow

@slashfilm I hope to dig into this soon. Sorry it's been a few days.

1:47 PM - 22 Feb 2014

1 RETWEET 2 FAVORITES

When I looked at slashfilm.com’s search visibility reports on SearchMetrics, it definitely shows a steep decline in traffic:

When we asked Google about this, they had no comment for us. If we hear more, we’ll update this post.
Source - http://searchengineland.com/google-look-movie-blogs-losing-traffic-185081

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WhatsApp Sorry For Outage After Facebook Deal

The purchase is the largest single acquisition in Facebook's history

Source: Company data. * = connected users

Graph: WhatsApp's User Base Beats Rivals'

Enlarge

• Email

The WhatsApp instant messaging app has apologised to users after being unavailable for several hours on Saturday night.

WhatsApp, which has more than 450 million monthly users, said it was having "server issues".

The company suffered the outage just days after it was snapped up by Facebook for $19bn (£11.4bn).

The messaging service tweeted at 8.16pm UK time on Saturday: "We hope to be back up and recovered shortly."

Users reacted angrily, saying their chat conversations were only showing a loading asterisk and the alert "Connecting..."

Taylor ITWT16 said on Twitter: "As Soon As Facebook Buys Whatsapp, Whatsapp Starts Malfunctioning."

Jazzy Marwaha tweeted: "Its been like 4 hours, you would have thought they could sort whatsapp out by now."

By 10.30pm the service appeared to be working again.

The firm tweeted: "WhatsApp service has been restored. We are so sorry for the downtime."

Facebook announced last Thursday that it would pay $4bn (£2.4bn) in cash and $15bn (£9bn) in Facebook shares as part of the deal to buy the real-time messaging service.

The app's founders and employees will get $3bn (£1.8bn) of the shares as restricted stock that will vest over four years after the deal closes.

The purchase marks the largest single acquisition in Facebook's 10-year history.

WhatsApp will "continue to operate independently and retain its brand" despite the acquisition, Facebook said.

Founded by a Ukrainian immigrant who dropped out of college, Jan Koum, and a Stanford alumnus, Brian Acton, WhatsApp is a Silicon Valley startup fairytale.

The acquisition will also see Mr Koum - a former Yahoo! engineer - join Facebook's board of directors.

Facebook is known to make bold moves to thwart competitors - it famously bought Instagram for $1bn after a weekend of negotiations.

:: Watch Sky News live on television, on Sky channel 501, Virgin Media channel 602, Freeview channel 82 and Freesat channel 202.

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Everything’s Not Awesome: Google News Spammed With Pitch To Watch “The Lego Movie” For Free

It’s definitely not what you expect to make the top of a Google News section, a crappy article promising that you can watch The Lego Movie online for free, not when the film is still in theaters. But that’s what Google is delivering up.

The screenshot above shows the situation, which reader Vishvesh Agrawal of DhanInfo tipped us to, after coming across it when reading Google News. The “story” appearing at the top of the Google News entertainment section is all types of bad.

Supposed News From The Call & Post

Let’s look at a close-up:

Supposedly, this is a story from the Call & Post, a newspaper out of Cleveland, Ohio. But the Call & Post has no stories at all about The Lego Movie when you use the newspaper’s own search tool:

Whatever You Don’t, Don’t Click For More

Nor does clicking on the supposed story in Google take you to the Call & Post. Instead, you’re redirected to here:

That’s a page within a free website hosting service called Nation2.com that promises you can watch The Lego Movie — which is still in theaters and not available online anywhere in the US legally — for free after taking a survey.

Selecting a survey link takes you to places like this:

Or here, where you get a scary pop-up that tries to get you to install software:

I didn’t try any of these offers to see what would happen after completing them. Perhaps I might have actually been allowed to watch the film, in the end, which almost certainly would have been a pirated copy. More likely, nothing would have happened at all.

A Hack At The Publication?

How this is happening is unclear. The page that’s ranking tops seems to be one of several full video movie pages that Google believes actually are on the Call & Post site:

The stories do appear to have resided on the Call & Post site at one time, because Google’s cached copy shows them complete with author names, such as here:

However, trying to reach any of the pages generates redirections on the Call & Post’s server that point (via the TinyURL.com shortening service) to Nation2.com. Chances are, someone has gained access to the Call & Post’s server, both to plant the stories and establish the redirections, perhaps through a hack.

Hack Extends To Google News

Servers get hacked all the time by people trying to hijack existing top rankings in Google and send traffic elsewhere. But it’s extremely odd for a hack like this to hit Google News.

The Google News ranking system is supposed to reward sites that have authority and expertise in particular subjects. This site has no such demonstrable expertise in movie reviews — it doesn’t regularly do them at all. And yet, this apparently hacked page got rewarded with top billing by Google News. It’s a terrible relevancy failure.

It’s also not going to help with Google’s relations with Hollywood, which feels Google doesn’t do enough to stop people from locating pirated content.

We’re checking with both the Call & Post and Google about the situation. But no doubt, it’ll end fairly soon after this story goes up.

As for The Lego Movie, I thought it was excellent. So go see it in a theater. Here’s a trailer for it:

Postscript (4:50am): Originally, the headline was “Everything’s Not Awesome: Google News Spammed With Pitch To Watch ‘The Lego Movie’ For Free,” which I thought was fair enough to say. While the Google News server wasn’t hacked into, as in a security issue, the algorithm was effectively hacked for this page to show up. But after the comment from Alex below, I reconsidered and went with “spammed” as a more accurate term.
Source - http://searchengineland.com/google-news-lego-movie-185007

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Amazing rags-to-riches story of WhatsApp founder Jan Koum

The most interesting part of their journey is that both Jan Koum and Brian Acton applied for a job in Facebook and were rejected in 2009.

Expressing disappointment over the rejection, Brian Acton had then tweeted, “Facebook turned me down. It was a great opportunity to connect with some fantastic people. Looking forward to life's next adventure.”

It has indeed one of the biggest adventures in the tech world and a befitting reply to Facebook. Life has come a full circle for this duo with this billion dollar acquisition.

"Focus on simplicity, listen to your customers and iterate if you fail."(Jan Koum said in an interview to The Recapp)

With Facebook acquiring WhatsApp, its co-founders - Jan Koum and Brian Acton - have become billionaires and stars of technology world.

It has been an incredible journey for Jan Koum who lived on food stamps as a teenager.

Koum has 45 per cent stake in the company, while Acton’s stake is 20 per cent, making them worth a whopping $6.8 billion and $3 billion respectively, according to Forbes.

Jan Koum who dislikes any kind of publicity, has even refused to put up a sign board outside their WhatsApp office.

Their company exemplifies the spirit of Silicon Valley… 

“WhatsApp is on a path to connect 1 billion people. The services that reach that milestone are all incredibly valuable,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.

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AdWords Top Movers Report Update: Now With Conversion Stats, Device-Level Segmentation

The Top Movers report debuted in AdWords last June to help advertisers quickly see performance changes in their accounts. It was helpful, but somewhat rudimentary with reporting on just clicks and cost changes. Today, Google announced that conversion data will begin appearing in the Top Movers report as well as device-specific insights.

Note that the report shown on the Home screen still includes just Cost and Clicks data, you’ll need to click on the “see full report” link or navigate to the Dimensions tab on the Campaigns screen to see the conversion data.

The Top Mover detail below is now sorted by Top Increases for Conversions and Top Decreases for Conversions. This performance data is segmented by device/network level, including by Search Partners, as shown in the example above. However, unlike the example below, the live examples I’ve looked at so far have included only one device-level segment per ad group, which is much more helpful. This type of segmentation will help advertisers quickly see if there are troubled areas at the device-level even if conversion stats overall look stable.

The conversion data will be a big help for managing performance campaigns. However, the ability to see changes in conversion rate and cost per conversion data would be especially helpful for understanding the impact on ROI.

The change has rolled out globally, so if you’re tracking conversions you should see this update in your account now.

 Source - http://searchengineland.com/adwords-top-movers-report-update-now-conversion-stats-device-level-segmentation-184936

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