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Yesterday, Google hosted a “factory tour” of their new search advances. Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience, blogged about the tour on the Official Google Blog. There were three main search areas that she touched on.

1. Image search. Google now offers an “early form of face recognition” in their advanced search. Also, Google is looking at including ads with image search.

2. Geo search. User-generated content (UGC) is critical when it comes to geo search, and Google is working on how to make all of it searchable.

3. User intent. Google hopes to read the minds of searchers by figuring out what they meant to search instead of the actual keywords typed. Wrote Mayer, “You’ll get pictures or maps when that’s what you meant. Understanding user intent also helps us break down language barriers and find the best possible answer regardless of what language it’s in or where it lives on the web.”

Do you think Google is psychic? Let us know if you think Google can pull off “user intent” by leaving a comment!

Related Reading:
Google: Our Brain is Just Fine, Thank You
Google News Clusters: Keep ‘Em Un-Separated
Google Finally Copies Microsoft, Adds ‘Related Searches’ to Google News

All those media pundits who said Google is a publisher are wrong.

Google isn’t a publisher. Google is a broadcaster. The 4th Network.

Or maybe just a search factory. We’ll know for sure soon.

On Monday, May 19, 2008, Google will webcast the “Google Factory Tour of Search” from Mountain View, CA and their Googleplex headquarters. Featured will be VP Marissa Mayer and product directors R.J. Pittman, Carter Maslan, and Johanna Wright among other Googlers certain to make cameos.

The focus? Google Health. Not “health” as in “stock price” but Google Health as in Google Docs.

Google promises an insider’s perspective on Search. You can’t be any more of an insider than webcasting from Google’s black box. Plus, the speakers will provide an update on Google Health.

You can find videos of executive talks and much more on the Official Google Channel on YouTube.

photo credit: Sydney Morning Herald

Gates at the Barbarians: “In terms of Google, not to overstate it, but they really don’t understand the special needs of business. Today, their economic model is based on consumer search. They have done an incredible job there and obviously we’re investing in challenging them in that space …”

Overheard at the Googleplex … or not:

Sergey: Say whut?
Larry: None. Bill talk crack just like alwayz.
Sergey: Talk ****, Get Hit.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates talked smack about Google at a press Q&A following the launch of Sharepoint yesterday:

“If you’ve seen … the Google tools that have tried to do productivity type things, they really don’t have the richness the responsiveness. You can see that relative [to] the success they have had there. Most of these Google products, to be frank, the day they announce them is their best day and then after that ….”

It was not a good day for Marissa Mayer on the Microsoftwatch, as Gates called out Google Talk as, well, a miserable failure:

“I remember there was one called G Talk. I can barely remember the name but it was so, you know, it was going to change the world, and so you know, it’s healthy that there are many choices that people have here.”

Separately, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer played Bob Barker, saying the price is right — and the timing — for Microsoft to buy Yahoo.

“The deal makes sense with the price and structure we announced. We hope it becomes reality,” he said at a press conference at CeBIT in Hanover. “There is a lot of merit for Microsoft and Yahoo, for Yahoo shareholders and for Microsoft shareholders, for advertisers and for consumers.”

So Jerry, “Come on down!”

Googlewashing is now the domain of live nude girls.

SEO PR and online reputation management companies officially co-opted the word “Googlewashing” today with the help of KUSA, a Denver NBC TV station. Yesterday the local news affiliate broadcast a story about “cleaning up negative information on the Internet.”

The story on embarassing photos and digital dirt resurrected the googlewash meme. Googlewashing now appears to be the domain of online reputation management companies like ReputationHawk.com, DefendMyName.com and ReputationDefender.com that charge to clean up your digital dirt.

Why else did googlewashing become such a hot topic on the day William F. Buckley Jr. died?

KUSA’s report and Web site video features nude and topless young women (covered by black bars for TV and Web audiences). No doubt that sent viewers racing to the search engines - and spawned follow-up stories at other local TV Web sites and blogs.

Googlewashing started as a threat to free speech and not a solution to personal indiscretions.

Andrew Orlovski of The Register UK coined “googlewash” from the word “greenwash” - a spot of paint that “transforms” something rotten into something new. The reality? Nothing’s changed.

The phrase that spurred Orlovski’s imagination originated almost five years ago to the day (Feb 17, 2003). Patrick Tyler in a front page story in the New York Times wrote that global anti-war protests had become “the second superpower.” Yet within 42 days, a small group of A-List tech bloggers had co-opted the phrase to mean something much more benign, pushing the anti-war slogan in the Times story further down in Google rankings.

That led Orlovski to realize Google had been “gamed” - and, he noted, the English language perverted - by the power of inbound links. The “meaning” of the phrase “second superpowers” had changed almost instantly.

Googlewashing soon morphed into googlebombing. The famous “miserable failure” ranking for President Bush (since eliminated by Google). Marissa Mayer responded to the controversy on the Official Google Blog in September of 2005 in her post “Googlebombing failure.”

Only months later Brian Livingston blogged Googlewashing’ Makes Your Site Invisible.

Livingston changed googlewash to mean the practice of scraping and stealing Web content on another blog. The result? Duplicate content appearing above your own.

He called it an example of “Googlewashing” — a term that combines Google and brainwashing.

In the ultimate irony, former war correspondent Kevin Sites, recently did a report on googlewashing: not for its Orwellian role in the anti-war movement but in a multimedia profile for Yahoo News of paid search advertiser ReputationDefender.com.

Want a snapshot of the day’s search marketing news? Here we’ve collected today’s top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

• Win a Free Pass to SES New York with the SES Affiliate Program
  If you’re planning on going, you probably want to tell your clients, readers, and friends. To make that worth your while, we’ve teamed up with Pepperjam Network to create the Search Engine Strategies Affiliate Program.
• Seven reasons to slip over to Islington for SES London
  So, why would you want to slip over to Islington for a few days to attend Search Engine Strategies London? Let me give you seven serious reasons.
• SEW Experts: Google PageRank: Simplified
  Google’s PageRank may be the single most divisive element in the search optimization game.
• SEW Experts: The Great Nofollow Link Debate of ‘08
  What started as a way to stop comment spam three years ago has turned into one of the most controversial topics in search.
• SEW Experts: Universal Pictures: Optimizing Video for Search
  We hear a lot about universal search and how it will keep SEO professionals on their toes with constantly evolving ranking algorithms. So how can local online advertisers take advantage of universal search?
• Google to Test Video Ads on SERPs
  Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of search products and user experience, said that just as video ads are not effective on pages of text-based search results, text ads are not effective on search results with more multimedia elements, like Google’s universal search results.
• Microsoft Shuffles Execs, Berkowitz to Exit
  Microsoft packed a number of promotions and departures into the press release. Most notable among them is the departure of Steve Berkowitz, who left Ask.com to join Microsoft nearly two years ago.
• Tag your Photobucket , Picasa and Flickr photos: SES London 2008
  If you’re going to Search Engine Strategies London next week, bring your camera or cameraphone, and don’t forget to tag them with “SES London 2008.”
• YouTube New Features - A Marketer’s Perspective
  It’s been an interesting week for YouTube this week–especially for those of us working in SMO or SMM (social media marketing), who spend our days marketing clients through YouTube videos.

Click to read the rest of this post…

Google has begun testing video ads on its search results pages, according to a report in the New York Times. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, told the Times that just as video ads are not effective on pages of text-based search results, text ads are not effective on search results with more multimedia elements, like Google’s universal search results.

“With universal search, something is getting shaken up a bit on the bottom part of the page,” Mayer said. “The ads on the top part of the page should match.”

Initially, video ads will not be apparent to searchers until they take action. Text ads with accompanying videos will be marked with a plus sign. Clicking on that plus sign will expand the video ad, just as clicking on the plus sign in some local results expands to include a map.

Observant search marketers will not be surprised, as Mayer alluded to this in May when Google launched universal search. At that time, Mayer responded to a question about the potential effect on ads with, “This opens the door for introducing richer media into the search results pages.”

In an interview with VentureBeat, Google VP Marissa Mayer says that social search is one avenue Google is pursuing to improve relevance in future iterations of its search engine. The algorithms could incorporate search history from a searcher’s Gmail contacts, or input from human experts, as startups like Mahalo, Search Wikia, Collarity and Eurekster are doing (in different ways).

Some ways to incorporate social data into search results that Mayer mentioned include:

1. Labeling or annotating search results, similar to the way social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and StumbleUpon let users add comments and tags to sites they find.
2. Show results from “users like you,” the technique used expertly by Amazon.com to help shoppers discover new products they may not have even known they wanted.
3. Using aggregate search histories of friends (or Gmail contacts) to influence search results

When asked what Google will look like ten years from now, Mayer replied, “I think one way it will be better is in understanding more about you and understanding more about your social context: Who your friends are, what you like to do, where you are. It’s hard to imagine that the search engine ten years from now isn’t advised by those things.”

Social search is expected by many to define the next generation of search. According to search historian Danny Sullivan, search 1.0 used on-page elements to rank pages, search 2.0 added external linking, and search 3.0 is the current state, with universal search and blended search. Search 4.0 will incorporate these social factors.

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