RSS
 

Archive for the ‘Analytics’ Category

Bing and Facebook Social Search now available

03 Nov

Last month, Bing and Facebook joined forces to bring some new social search features into the Bing search engine.

Today, this is now live for US customers, with rollouts globally over the next few months. This update allows users to sign in to the Facebook accounts within Bing and get a more personalised search service as a result. The first of these new services is Liked Results, which shows you relavant links to your search that are also liked by your friends in Facebook.

For more details on the other elements in social search you can read the full article over on liveside.net

 

Google introduces new web image format

02 Oct

Google has placed a great deal of emphasis on speed for the last year or two, offering numerous tools and resources aimed at speeding things up. The speed theme continues as Google has introduced a new image format from the web, aimed at speeding up load times. It’s called WebP

 Those interested in SEO will likely find the status of the format worth paying attention to, as Google recently announced that it now counts page speed as a ranking factor. Just remember, page speed is only one of a few hundred ranking factors the search giant takes into consideration.

Heres an extract from the announcement

“Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time. Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution. As part of this effort, we are releasing a developer preview of a new image format, WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before. Images and photos make up about 65% of the bytes transmitted per web page today. They can significantly slow down a user’s web experience, especially on bandwidth-constrained networks such as a mobile network. Images on the web consist primarily of lossy formats such as JPEG, and to a lesser extent lossless formats such as PNG and GIF. Our team focused on improving compression of the lossy images, which constitute the larger percentage of images on the web today. “

Googles set a site up where you can compare the sizes and load times of JPEGs and WebPs. Theres also has a conversion tool to convert images to the new format that can be downloaded, and is working with the web browser and web developer community to add support for the format. Google is also developing a patch for WebKit to provide native support for WebP in an upcoming release of Chrome. It also plans to add support for a transparency layer or alpha channel in a future update.

It will be very interesting to see how widely this format gets adopted over time.

 
 

Google allows end users to opt out of Analytics reporting

26 May
Google has announced that end users will be allowed to download a plug-in for their browsers to stop sites using Google analytics from tracking what they do and where they go. Google has suggested that the initial take-up of this option will mean around a 10% loss of traffic being reported. If you use the Analytics service, and you see a drop in activity, It may be because of this plug in, and not because of a drop in visits.

Personally, I think this number will get much higher as the knowledge of this plug-in permeates the Internet. You may need to start thinking of how much reliance and importance you place on the data you get from this service.

Here’s a link to Googles official announcement, http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-analytics-more-choice-for-users.html