Google is the ‘best’ search engine out there, at least that is what most people believe. Why? Because Google gives back the most relevant results. Or do they? Sometimes even Google ‘messes up’ so to speak. When looking for an image to go along a post about blogging I wrote today on State of Search I found these remarkable results:

Quite remarkable is it? There must be a logical explanation, maybe its personalized search, but most probably its because there are so many people blogging about their cats.

Of course I also checked this search on Bing Images (which looks much better than Google’s by the way) and to be fair: they didn’t give me the results I wanted either, but they didn’t find that much cats as Google did… It’s time for search engines to implement the user intent they have been talking about lately.

“Hell froze over” when Google decided to actually pay for an ad during the Super Bowl in the United States this year. The ad however was  an ‘oldie’, a video called ‘Parisian Love’ in which searches on Google were shown. It was a nice video which had some response to it. But Google now decided it was gonna do more with that video and gave users the opportunity to create one of those videos themselves. They created Google (YouTube) Search Stories.

By simply putting in search terms, choosing where the search should go (images, web, blogs etcetera) and choosing the music you can make your very own ‘Parisian Love‘. Something which many now have done over the past few days. And so have I…

I decided to play around a little with the functionality and create my own video. You can find the result here:

What do you think? I must say it was pretty easy to create the actual video, but there were a couple of things I didn’t like. You don’t really have much control over it. Google decides which way the ‘camera’ rolls,

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As said I spoke at the B2B Marketingforum yesterday in Amsterdam. It was an interesting day. My presentation went allright, I kind of got carried away a little and because I did in Dutch talked to much so I used the full amount of time I had. Could have kept going on for hours .

I talked about the changing SERPS and how we should act on that, making the most use out of it. I wrote about that on State of Search also. Below you can find my presentation, in Dutch so for those not speaking Dutch: here’s Google Translate, or just ask me

At the end of last year I had a small problem. My N95 screen died on me, and then the entire phone. No phone in these days thats something you can hardly imagine. And immediately there was a dilemma: was I going to wait for the Nexus. At that time the Nexus wasn’t even launched and God knows when it will ever be available in the Netherlands… I was tempted to go for the iPhone but decided to ask my Twitter friends what to do:

I was surprised to get this answer: Continue Reading »

Why do I think that newspapers will keep on existing, although they are doing everything to kill themselves these days? Because of newspapers like The New York Times. And not because of the business-part, but because of the quality of people working there. They make very good content, which you can only make if you put time and effort to it. This weekend The New York Times made a piece of content again which I like very much. It looks simple, but it has taken some time to make . See below the comparison they made between Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo. Very handy!