A Week In Digital
Google in the Dock
The EU is to investigate Google over antitrust claims, the allegations centre on whether Google gives preference to its own services over that of competing search services, such as price comparison sites. Another issue is how Google assigns Quality Scores in paid search, with companies claiming that Google has lowered their Quality Score when Google has its own competing service.
Google responded to the allegations, noting that its goal is to serve users’ needs first over that of other websites. “It may seem obvious, but not every website can come out on top, or even appear on the first page of our results, so there will always be people who are unhappy about their rankings,”
Don’t hold your breath for a early result on this as the Microsoft case took nearly 10 years to conclude.
Ads on Google Images go live
Launched in July, the first Ads on Google Images went live last week in the US and UK with Disney, Fiat and Mazda at the front of the queue to run ads alongside image searches on Google.
The ads will appear along the top of image search, they contain both an image and text. Google says they won’t interfere with organic search results at all, and they are clearly marked as sponsored links, with a different colour background
Will this change the way users search for products, and will clever use of images be more effective than ad copy?
Yahoo Publishes Top 10 UK Searches for 2010
Its that time of year again where we look back at what’s been keeping the search engines busy, first up is Yahoo with its top ten for the UK in 2010.
Top 10 Yahoo Searches in the UK in 2010, last year’s position in ()
- Lottery
- Job Centre (3)
- Weather
- Big Brother (1)
- Cheryl Cole (9)
- TV guide
- World Cup
- Train times (10)
- Katie Price (8)
- Horoscopes
The list highlights that the recession is biting hard as searches for ‘Lottery’ came in at #1, a new entry on last year’s chart, and show how we seem to be obsessed with winning our way out of financial hardship.
More people in the UK are also using Yahoo to find their local job centre, or find information about getting a new job at the job centre
A major change since last year is that only two celebrities featured unlike the US Top ten which was dominated by them. Unsurprisingly the BP Oil Spill was the top search for US searchers.
