Search engine marketers aren’t having an easy time with Google these days.

Google have made a change to the search results interface which aims to make it more Digg/Wiki like by allowing users to move results up and down the list, delete sites from a results set and even add sites into a set of results.

For the user this is actually a really nice piece of functionality as it allows you to tailor search results to make them more relevant to you, I’m assuming it’s all stored in your web history so future searches keep the customisation.

What this does do is make it really hard for a search engine marketer to know whether what they see as the top ten results on Google is what the users are seeing. In most cases the answer is probably no now.

I think it’s a great move though and could actually help to focus the search engine optimisation industry on making pages more relevant through improving content and engaging users as that is what will encourage them to keep a result high up their list!

Full details on the Google Blog.

Two of my favourite blogs are Techcrunch and Mashable, both tend to cover the same topics a lot of the time. If a post goes up on one it will usually appear on the other soon after, which isn’t a problem really given their unique take on the topics. They both put their own spin on the stories which is interesting to see how their opinions compare. That said, the volume of posts which are similar between the two blogs is very high and surely this must affect their readership numbers, given that some readers will naturally choose one over the other.

For example; right now the latest 10 posts on Techcrunch are:

• Facebooks verified app program
• Macbooks new anti-piracy features
• Google’s mobile voice search app
• A Flash gaming collective
• Twitter being down
• Amazon CloudFront
• Google’s mobile voice search app (again)
• The iFun iPhone app
• Jerry Yang stepping down at Yahoo
• Facebooks verified app program (again)

The latest 10 posts on Mashable are:

• Digg recommendation engine (been covered before on Techcrunch)
• YouTube vs Hulu (lot’s of coverage on both blogs in the past)
• NewsJunk folding
• The iFun iPhone app
• Jerry Yang stepping down at Yahoo
• Facebooks verified app program
• Sites you can sell old gadgets on
• Mogees, an app store middle man
• Google Analytics for Flash (covered yesterday on Techcrunch)
• How not to build your Twitter community

The ones in red are covering the same topics on both blogs. The ones in blue have been covered before on the other blog. This shows the huge crossover between these massively popular blogs.

Now, I’m not saying this is a bad thing at all. I’m all for diversity and choice and I enjoy reading both blogs and the angle they take on the tech news of the day. I’m interested in whether you think that a merger between the two could actually be a good thing? I wonder what would be lost by this, whether Techcrunch could swallow up Mashable, cover the mainstream stuff still and allow Mashable a channel of their own (like Crunchgear) to continue their great lists of useful links and apps.

What do you think? Is it time to reduce duplication in the big blogs?

Sometimes even a mega-company like Google casn get beaten to the mark with a new piece of functionality that they should really be providing themselves. The reasons for this? Perhaps they overstretch themselves with their range of products and can’t focus enough to add the bells and whistles we’d all like? Or maybe they get a product to the point where it gets traction and keeps acquiring users and then leave it open for the rest of us to add the bells and whistles functional pieces?

Whatever the reason, there are occasions when great additions are made to their services which they aren’t responsible. The latest of these that I’ve come across is something called Glync which has been created by a company called Virante.

It’s a Firefox plugin which grants them access to store your data from Google Webmaster Tools to enable them to show you a graph showing the history of incoming links to your site and how that changes over time. An extremely useful tool, but in my opinion one which should be a standard feature of Googles webmaster tool set.

How long will this plugin be useful? Until Google decides to offer it themselves I’d say. That said, it is a very nice piece of functionality and the free version is most useful.

One thing that really annoys me in the online world is missed opportunity. Too often there are two companies with different offerings who refuse to acknowledge the potential synergies between them, and therefore miss revenue opportunity. Even worse is when it’s two brands of the same business!

If synergies exist and there’s no potential conflicts of interest then why not embrace the opportunity?

The opportunity might be a chance to merchandise your product on the other brands site, come up with some sort of joint offering or simply acquire traffic via them.

Whatever the opportunity, these mutually profitable opportunities are not to be sniffed at.

Mozilla have announced on their blog that Firefox usage hit 20% for two weeks in October. The figures come from a report by Market Share from Net Applications. It’s a milestone for Firefox use so they rightly shout about it.

There seem to be a few negative blog posts about this saying ’so what’ and ‘more to do’ etc but I actually think this is a massive achievement given that their main competitor gets bundled into home PC’s and is widely distributed on businesses desktops. And the fact that Mozilla haven’t bundled it with adverts or overtly tried to create a revenue stream from this audience should be commended in my opinion.

In my experience of running websites for the financial services and travel industries I have never experienced a site which had more than 10% of it’s users on Firefox, so Mozilla still have to break into some areas. I’d be really interested to know what their penetration for different categories of sites was, anyone know?

Troogle? TravGoogle? GooTravel? Whatever you want to imagine the name may be the thought of Google jumping into the travel arena has operators and agents either salivating with the thought of the traffic and sales it could drive or quaking with fear at the thought of them owning the customer experience. Rumours keep appearing of the intentions of Google, but up till now there hasn’t been any obvious functionality leaking out of Googleplex which could support a serious move into travel. That is, until now (at least I’ve only just found it)…

There’s a new(ish) beta on Google for a Merchant search (only appears when you’re in the right place searching the right thing). This is basically a price comparison engine, currently only serving the loan market. My question is, could this power a travel price comparison engine and so switch users to this type of interface and functionality if they search for the right travel related keywords? Could Google then become an affiliate to travel companies? I’d imagine TravelSupermarket would hope not!!

The buzz around semantic web keeps on growing. Here’s a really good article from Scientific American titled ‘The Semantic Web in Action‘, first published in December ‘07. Also worth a read is the latest post on the Nodalities blog ‘Semantic What?‘.

Wow! Good progress is being made towards allowing humans to immerse themselves in virtual worlds. This video shows a new camera which allows you to translate body movements into Second Life.

It may look a little basic at the moment but once the worlds get more ‘real’ there is real potential for many industries (including travel) to really go to town on providing the next best thing to their ‘real’ products online.

Good news in the browser standards war. Thins are really hotting up now as Opera has announced that their latest beta (or maybe even alpha) has passed the Acid3 test.

Let’s see the responses from Mozilla and Microsoft as they try to get IE and Firefox up to speed…

Advertising can be so boring sometimes. It’s far more engaging to create an advert that makes your prospective customers stop and stare while they try to figure out what it is you’re trying to market to them. Then the moment of realisation kicks in when they figure out what your product or service is and that’s when it gets stuck in their minds and advertising recall pays off.

Here’s some great examples on these two pages (link 1 and link 2).

My favourite I think has to be this one advertising a casino in an airport: