In its drive to make web surfing and communications more secure Google has already started warning users when they visit HTTP pages. On April 27, Google has announced that it will issue security warning when users enter data on an HTTP page, and on all HTTP pages visited in Incognito mode. Chromium team says, “Our plan to label HTTP sites as non-secure is taking place in gradual steps, based on increasingly broad criteria. Since the change in Chrome 56, there has been a 23% reduction in the fraction of navigations to HTTP pages with password or credit card forms on desktop, and we’re ready... [...]

Forrester’s Shar VanBoskirk has posted an article presenting the details of Alphabet’s Q1 2017 earnings. The article focuses on Google’s largest revenue drivers — adwords and programmatic ads, status of the search volumes over a period of time and Amazon’s competition with Google. VanBoskirk adds, “I don’t expect Google to feel a pinch as much as a change in its revenue composition. By the time Google’s paid search business starts to give way to intelligent agents just offloading decisions, its online video (youtube) ad products will take over... [...]

Google has released a video showing how the company makes improvements to its search algorithm. In 2017, Google ran 130,336 search quality tests. Google Search team says, “We work with external Search quality raters to measure the quality of search results on an ongoing basis. Raters assess how well a website gives people who click on it what they are looking for, and evaluate the quality of results based on the expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness of the content. These ratings do not directly impact ranking, but they do help us benchmark the quality of our results and make... [...]

Michael Guta says, “Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) recently suggested more steps toward eliminating duplicate content across the web. And website owners, including small business owners, may want to pay attention considering the search engine has a history of eventually penalizing sites for not taking heed. Google Noindex Advice Specifically, websites currently republishing content sourced from original authors are now encouraged to “noindex” that content. This Google noindex advice is something most content creators are unlikely to follow. In a fight to rank on the top page of Google, specifically... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Google parent Alphabet Inc. announced revenues of $24.75 billion for the first quarter of this year, a 22 percent increase year over year. That’s above analyst expectations, and the stock is up in after-hours trading. Ad revenues were $21.4 billion, a 19 percent increase over Q1 2015. Google site revenues were $17.4 billion (up 21 percent), and network revenues were $4 billion (up 9 percent). Paid clicks were up on Google sites and network properties, 53 percent and 10 percent respectively. The trend of lower YoY CPCs continued, with Google site CPCs down 21 percent... [...]

Jason Abbruzzese says, “Google is fighting fake news with its biggest tool: Search. Google announced on Tuesday that it’s tweaking its search engine to scuttle misleading or false content, a major move for the company and the world considering Google’s dominance in search. The changes will include alterations to the search engine’s algorithms that choose which pages to surface in response to queries. “We’ve adjusted our signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content, so that issues similar to the Holocaust denial results that we... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Today, Google has reaffirmed that 15 percent of Google searches done by users on a daily basis have never been seen before. Google said this back in 2013 and now has restated that metric as Google announced Project Owl this morning. Google wrote: There are trillions of searches on Google every year. In fact, 15 percent of searches we see every day are new — which means there’s always more work for us to do to present people with the best answers to their queries from a wide variety of legitimate sources. While our search results will never be perfect, we’re as... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “To allow advertisers to buy and compare video ad performance across linear TV and digital, Google is bringing programmatic access to linear TV inventory to DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM). The new offering, announced at the National Association for Broadcasters (NAB) conference in Las Vegas on Monday, taps inventory sources from WideOrbit, clypd and Google Fiber, the company’s own high-speed internet service. Google Fiber offers access to addressable local inventory on cable networks; WideOrbit from local affiliates; and clypd from national broadcast and cable networks. “By... [...]

Dr. Peter J. Meyers says, “Just over 9 months ago, I wrote that 30% of page-1 Google results in our 10,000-keyword tracking set were secure (HTTPS). As of earlier this week, that number topped 50%. While there haven’t been any big jumps recently – suggesting this change is due to steady adoption of HTTPS and not a major algorithm update – the end result of a year of small changes is dramatic. More and more Google results are secure. MozCast is, of course, just one data set, so I asked the folks at Rank Ranger, who operate a similar (but entirely different) tracking system, if they... [...]

Patrick Kulp says, “Google, the internet’s biggest advertising company, may be building an ad blocker. The search giant plans to roll out a feature in the next mobile version of its Chrome browser that would filter out certain types of ads, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Such a tool seems at odds with the company’s primary revenue source, but Google thinks that it could actually deter people from resorting to other blockers in the long run, according to the report. By targeting only the most disruptive ad formats — pop-ups, interstitials, and autoplay videos,... [...]