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in 2010, Google did something very different. Google announced website speed would begin having an impact on search ranking. Now, the speed at which someone could view the content from a search result would be a factor.

Google's Matt Cutts announced that slow-performing mobile sites would soon be penalized in search rankings as well.

While Google has been intentionally unclear in which particular aspect of page speed impacts search ranking, they have been quite clear in stating that content relevancy remains king.

an example a search for a spicy meal in San Francisco. A search for "restaurants liked by my friends from India" revealed a long list. Narrowing that to "Indian restaurants liked by my friends from India" yielded another list. Then he searched for restaurants in San Francisco liked by Culinary Institute of America graduates.

In cases where Graph Search comes up blank – which is likely to be a frequent occurrence in its infancy – the service defaults to the web search engine Bing, which is run by Google's rival Microsoft.

"I want to invite friends over for Game of Thrones," he said, "but who among my friends likes Games of Thrones? Graph Search tells me."

Overall desktop ad spending set to decline in 2014 while mobile grows 83.0% Desktop search in the US is poised for a significant decline this year as paid clicks on Google shift toward mobile devices, according to new figures from eMarketer. US mobile search ad spending grew 120.8% in 2013, contributing to an overall gain of 122.0% for all mobile ads. Meanwhile, overall desktop ad spending increased just 2.3% last year, according to eMarketer.

desktop search ad spending will drop $1.4 billion this year, a decrease of 9.4% from 2013, while mobile search will increase 82.3% year over year. Mobile search will total $9.02 billion, compared with $13.57 billion for desktop search. Overall, US spending on advertising served to desktops and laptops will decline 2.4% in 2014 to $32.39 billion, down from $33.18 billion in 2013. Google will have a notable influence on the overall shift from desktop to mobile search spending. In 2013, 76.4% of the company’s search ad revenues came from desktop. However, that share will fall to 66.3% in 2014 due to a $770 million decrease in desktop search ad revenues year over year, eMarketer estimates. At the same time, the company’s mobile search revenues will increase $1.76 billion, totaling approximately one-third of Google’s total search revenues.

Up from 19.4% in 2013, mobile search will comprise an estimated 26.7% of the company’s total ad revenues this year. Desktop search declined to 63.0% of Google’s ad revenues in 2013, having already fallen from 72.7% in 2012.

With contextual search, it's no longer enough to get your business or product listed on the first Web page of results. On a mobile device, as well as in push situations, SEO is really effective only if you can push your results into the top position, or at least into the first few lines.

This is one reason why the search engines are working so hard to deliver knowledge rather than just Web page links in their results. Google and Bing both now feature "knowledge boxes" that try to encapsulate the pertinent information about a topic in one glance. This "knowledgization" of search results is conducive to mobile search because it parses data into easily displayed and digestible chunks - essential for the smaller screen.

Wearable devices like Google Glass and the rumored iWatch could put even more pressure on search results. We don't yet know what their interfaces will look like, but it seems safe to assume that there may be even less real estate available to display search results.

Search traffic to publishers has taken a dive in the last eight months, with traffic from Google dropping more than 30% from August 2012 through March 2013, according to research done by BuzzFeed. While Google makes up the bulk of search traffic to publishers, traffic from all search engines has dropped by 20% in the same period.

Of the three major search engines — Google, Yahoo and Bing — only Yahoo saw growth in this period. While Yahoo grew search traffic in this period, it sent 21M referrals to publishers in March, less than half of the 48M referrals sent by Google. Traffic from Bing dropped 12%.

In the past, we've reported how referrals from social platforms like Facebook to the BuzzFeed Network were growing, and at times sending more traffic than search. While that difference was at times marginal — 5 to 10M referrals — its now sustained and significant. In March, Facebook sent 1.5x more traffic than Google, the greatest difference we've ever measured between the platforms. At the same time, we've watched traffic from other social platforms — Twitter and Pinterest -—continue to grow an audience and drive traffic traffic to publishers. "Dark social," that netherland of direct traffic, is also accelerating on the network, growing referral traffic to publishers by 52% over the past twelve months. By comparison, referrals from social platforms, i.e. the Facebooks, Twitters, Pinterests and Reddits of the world, grew by 25%. It begs the question, could direct traffic be taking the place of search?

Proactive software agents will reduce the need to waste time looking for information.

Contextual search tools like Google Now, which takes into account where you are and what you are doing to provide useful information, are the first big step towards anticipatory and responsive software agents.

In the consumer world right now, Apple's Siri is the most well-known example thus far of how a software agent will interact with humans, though it has its limitations, both in speech recognition and plain common sense. As that interaction is smoothed out, though, it is not hard to imaging giving agents like Siri or Google Now's voice search more permissions to act on the information at hand, instead of just reporting it. Once that hurdle is overcome, all of that predictive and contextual information that the Internet is starting to finding for us will have a smooth, human-like interface and better able to help us manage our days.

Today I searched for “search engine” on Google. The first result was for Wikipedia, then came Dogpile, searchengine.ie, DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc. The Google search engine didn’t appear until the third page of results, which means it might as well be sitting on top of Mount Everest from a search findability perspective.The Google homepage is absolutely atrociously optimized for search engines, but tremendously well optimized for people who search. The Google design is focused on what the customer wants to do, which is to search and find stuff. Google is not focused on getting itself found but on helping customers find.

Yes, it’s important to get found. But what happens after you get found is crucial. From a customer’s point of view, finding a particular website is just the first step in completing a task.

Google wasn’t always popular. Once upon a time it was a totally unknown website run by two students. Its strategy to get found was based on being useful. That’s by far the best philosophy

As the number of Internet-enabled consumer devices continues to grow, so does the propensity of consumers to sequentially use multiple devices to complete a single online task. In fact, according to a new study from Google, 90 percent of people move among devices to accomplish a goal.

Examples of how consumers sequentially use multiple devices for a single task include opening an email on a smartphone and then finishing reading it on a home PC and looking up product specs on a laptop after seeing a TV commercial

98 percent of sequential screeners move between devices in the same day to complete a task

71% of smartphone users search because of an ad they’ve seen either online or offline; 82% of smartphone users notice mobile ads, 74% of smartphone shoppers make a purchase as a result of using their smartphones to help with shopping, and 88% of those who look for local information on their smartphones take action within a day.

These are some of the key findings from “The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users,” a study from Google and conducted by Ipsos OTX, an independent market research firm, among 5,013 US adult smartphone Internet users at the end of 2010.

General Smartphone Usage: Smartphones have become an integral part of users’ daily lives. Consumers use smartphones as an extension of their desktop computers and use it as they multi-task and consume other media.81% browse the Internet, 77% search, 68% use an app, and 48% watch videos on their smartphone 72% use their smartphones while consuming other media, with a third while watching TV 93% of smartphone owners use their smartphones while at home 

In 2013, 19 percent of Google’s ad revenue came from mobile search ads, and it’s expected to rise to 30 percent over the next 3 years, according to eMarketer.

the company projects that mobile devices will account for 50 percent of all paid search clicks on Google in the United States by December 2015. Last year in the US, the share of paid search clicks from mobile devices rose from 21.8 percent in January to 34.2 percent in December. Paid search clicks from smartphones almost doubled throughout 2013.

In the US, conversion rates on tablets rose above desktop for the first time. Smartphone conversion rate still lags at 4.4% compared to 5.3 percent on desktop and 5.5 percent on tablets.

its AdWords product - shown beside searches

"Advertisers have long been able to add informative visual elements to their search ads, with features like Media Ads" - which adds video ads on Google search results page - Product Listing Ads" - which appear in Google's shopping results box - "and Image Extensions", which allows advertisers to put small images alongside "sponsored results", when they buy advertising space over search results.

anticipatory systems. 

Increasingly, rather than waiting for us to tell them what we want, in the form of a search query or command, they'll prompt us with suggestions.

Here's a simple definition of anticipatory systems. Think of them as artificially intelligent services that are aware of external context — including ambient inputs like time of day, social connections, upcoming meetings, local weather, traffic and more.

the truth is context is more powerful than personalisation in average search usage.

In my view we shouldn't go overboard with personalisation in search because serendipity is really valuable. We have explicit algorithms built into Google search so that personalisation does not take over your page.

You need as a user to get all points of view. I don't want anyone to only get just one point of view. So in my view it will get more relevant, but personalisation will not take over your search page.

the goal was to introduce "conversational search." To have a conversation, you need a conversational partner.

Contests and sweepstakes on Twitter may offer prizes for tweeting a particular update, for following a particular user, or for posting updates with a specific hashtag.

Please be sure to include a rule stating that anyone found to use multiple accounts to enter will be ineligible.

Please don’t set rules to encourage lots of duplicate updates (like saying, “whoever retweets this the most wins”).  Your contest or sweepstakes could cause users to be automatically filtered out of Twitter search. Plus, instead of their followers seeing your cool contest or sweepstakes, their followers might start getting annoyed by your contest. You might want to set a clear contest rule stating that multiple entries in a single day will not be accepted.

In a post-Penguin environment, building natural backlinks should be a primary objective for webmasters.

Digital marketing today needs to be “natural.” Ideally, instead of building manufactured backlinks (as was a primary focus of past SEO best practices), your site should acquire links in a natural way—as it would if you did absolutely no promotional work whatsoever.

The key to building natural backlinks is to publish high-quality content that people will be inclined to share naturally on social media networks. After all, if you produce mediocre content, there’s no incentive for readers to link back to or share your website, making it even harder to get the backlinks needed to rank well in the new natural search results.

Last week Princeton researchers released a widely covered study saying Facebook would lose 80% of its users by 2015-2017. But now Facebook’s data scientists have turned the study’s silly “correlation equals causation” methodology of tracking Google search volume against it to show Princeton would lose all of its students by 2021.

the critical error in the non-peer-reviewed study is stating that since the volume of searches for “Facebook” began declining in 2012, it must mean there’s an ongoing decline in Facebook usage. Yeah, no. Back in Facebook’s web heyday around 2007, many people did surf to the social network by searching for “Facebook” or “Facebook login.” But then this thing called mobile came along and people started getting to Facebook by opening an app, not searching for a website. So searches for “Facebook” declining doesn’t prove much considering over half of Facebook’s traffic now comes from mobile. Since 2012 Facebook has kept growing to its current 1.19 billion users, and it has never had an overall decline in user count.

today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.

The company now lets you find your photos both on Google+ and Google Search just by, well, searching for them.

this goes further than just serving you a list of all your photos; Google says it has now also started using computer vision and machine learning to understand what your query.

What’s amazing here is that these results are not being served based on tags, captions, or other ways to denote what is in a given photo. Google is analyzing the content of all your photos and deciding which ones are relevant to your query.