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The Ever-Changing Nature Of Search

Google announced yesterday that the Knowledge Graph would now include information on tour dates and concert schedules for performance artists. (Brief nod to SearchEngineLand and WebProNews who also covered the story early).
This means that when you search Google for a band or musician, details of their upcoming performances (if any) will be displayed on the search results page.

Google Knowledge Graph
The Knowledge Graph was a supplementary update to search results rolled out by Google to present educational answers to user search queries. You’ve no doubt noticed these – they appear on the right hand side of search results pages and normally include a synopsis pulled from Wikipedia and include a photo and basic biographical details.
Below is an example  based on a search for Lady Gaga. (Brief aside: I am not a fan of Lady Gaga. Not that I have anything against her, I’m just not much of a pop music guy). But I digress.
Visually, the search results page is split into two columns down the centre. The left side features “regular” search results such as news articles and websites that are optimised for the term “Lady Gaga”. (Brief aside: if you would like to talk to InBound about Search Engine Optimisation, please contact us.) The right side of the page contains the Knowledge Graph results featuring factual information relating to Lady Gaga.

What’s important here now is highlighted in the red box – Lady Gaga’s upcoming tour dates in New York. All that’s really missing from this type of search experience now is a direct purchase link from these results.

How Does Google Do This?
Google provide three ways for websites to get in on the game:
1. Structured data markup – schema.org
2. Event widgets such as BandPage
3. The Data Highlighter […]

By |March 13th, 2014|Search|Comments Off on The Ever-Changing Nature Of Search

Using Google To Find Royalty Free Images

Royalty-Free Stock Images
The guys over at DigitalRelevance broke a great bit of news for content marketers and web developers the world over – free Getty Images!   (I should say, I think it was Bloomberg that was first with the story but it was the DR post I saw first…)
Since it’s formation in 1995, Getty quickly grew to prominence through a succession of acquisitions in the digital stock and communications space.  For as long as I can remember, no matter what I read – newspapers, magazines, online content – I was hard pressed to never see a reference or citation to Getty Images – irrespective of the content, be it sports or business.
Getting back to the point, it’s believed that Getty made the move as a sort of capitulation to the fact that their images were being used without their permission anyway. In addition to opening up their treasure trove of images they provide two ways for the images to be used: downloaded or embedded. It isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that providing the embed mechanism perhaps allows them to track the use of their images across the web.
Now, before you rush off to GettyImages.com and cherry pick your favourite stock imagery for your website, I’d like to provide you (or remind you of) a good old-fashioned alternative to finding royalty-free images:
Google Images.

Using Google To Find Royalty-Free Images
Google have long provided search access to royalty-free images.  There are two ways of finding these:
Google Advanced Image Search or Image Search Tools.

Google Advanced Image Search
Advanced Image Search (http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search) allows you to narrow the focus and specificity of your image search over a range of filters including, for example, keywords, colour and hue, pixel size and image file […]

By |March 13th, 2014|Digital Marketing, Search|Comments Off on Using Google To Find Royalty Free Images