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oogle has removed the Video link on its search results pages with one to Google Product Search, relegating the very useful Video link to the “More” menu. The Video link is fourteen items down the More menu, making it a lot of work to reach. Previously, on any Google search, you could hit Video to get results from dozens of popular and unpopular video sites, making it the easiest way to find video on the internet. Now? Not so much.

Google seems to be prioritizing Product Search, with its huge links to Google Checkout, over Video, which is actually a very popular and fast growing segment of the internet. It’s a decision that, unless backed up by traffic number saying no one used the Video link, makes no sense and implies Google ignored the needs of its users over its need to sell stuff. That’s dissapointing.

I’ve been trying to find a video card for my wife’s computer all week, and Google has been no help. Every search on a product name reveals site after site that is selling that product. Why Google can’t do powerful integration with Product Search, and then remove the product results from the web results, I have no idea. I could not find forums discussing my various technical issues, because Google listed site after site with the same useless sales information.

Google needs to do a non-commercial search engine. They’d be able to sell more ads, since the results would contain no stores, and users would finally have a way to get answers to their questions. I posted my questions to my two blogs because Google was a waste of my time. Three years ago, when I started doing this, Google was the place that indexed blogs and forums and ranked them high, now it’s the place that ranks every outdated deal and online store above actual information.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. When it comes to searching for anything anyone is selling, there isn’t any information to be found.

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Leverage Seminars, Videos, Commercials For Better Web Results Many companies have marketing gold…

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Google Blogoscoped has an interesting article about using hotlinked images to gain high organic rankings.

Michel Telendro told Phillip Lenssen, ““I do one of this hotlinking with one flickr image in a new domain (3 weeks, no backlinks) and in one week I was ranking #3 for that keyword in [Google Images].”
Case in point – do an image search for paris in Spanish Google, and of the top 5 results, all but 1 are hotlinking the image. Even when you do a Google web search, thanks to the direct image results box on top of the web results, a hot linker ranks top for paris.”

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The experimental Google Trends site has added another measurement for searches, highlighting the hottest trends for site visitors.

Google Trends shows how search terms have been queried over time. It plots the number of searches on a graph, and can plot multiple search terms to show how trendy they have been in comparison.

Barry Schwartz spotted something new on Google Trends. His Search Engine Land post picked up on the new Hot Trends section, recently added by Google’s mad scientists to the service.

“I was told to think of it as Google noticing a “sudden rise” in a query phrase, that is not in the norm for that query,” Barry said in his post. “The higher the rise, the hotter the query is. Google has a “hotness level” score for these queries, the hottest is ‘volcanic’, followed by ‘on fire,’ ’spicy,’ ‘medium’ and ‘mild.’”

It sounds more like the lineup at Buffalo Wild Wings than a technology product, and who knows, maybe Google brainstormed this update over wings and beer. There is more to Hot Trends than just some flavorful names.

The top ten hot trends appear on the Trends home page. A link to more hot trends shows the top 100 as currently determined by Google. At press time, searches related to the final episode of ‘The Bachelor’ dominated the top ten.

Links to each hot item lead to a profile for it. The hotness scale appears there, along with a graph of its search volume, and a note as to when searches peaked for the term. Related news articles, blog posts, and web results will appear on the page, though right now only the blog posts feature seems to be working.

It’s fun to look at, and we expect Google to flesh it out more over time; how about image links for starters?

Google Trends, Hotness

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