Back in 2009 Ms Bartz took over from one of the companies founders Jerry Yang, in an attempt to turn around its falling fortunes as it continually lost ground in the search industry to Google. However, despite her early job cuts to save money, and enhanced focus on providing personalised search resultds, the fortunes could not be turned, and she has been ‘removed from the board of directors, effective immediately’.

Chief financial office Tim Morse will take over temporarily whilst the board of directors work to find a full time replacement.

In my opinion, this change of captain is hardly surprising, despite partnerships with Bing and continued work to try and establish itself as a true competitor in the industry again, Yahoo! seem to have stagnated and made very little progress, whilst Facebook has emerged and revolutionised the way people spend their time online, and Google remain search leaders have developed their own highly popular mobile operating system, and become a competitor in the social media market.

However, whether or not the change will actually make any real impact remains to be see and turn their fortunes around remains to be seen, either way, something signifcant will need to be done to turn Yahoo! around.

For more information regarding search engines, SEO, or getting your business online, then please call the Web Design Nottingham team today on 01623 650333.

These discontinued services are to include social powered question and answer tool ‘Aardvark’, news content experiment ‘Fast Flip’ and note taking service ‘Notebook’.

This is being done so that Google can slim down their range of services, provide more simplicity for users, and to allow them to put more focus and resources into developing on its more popular services. A quote from senior vice president Alan Eustace on the official Google blog said :

“Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features. [...] This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience. It will also mean we can devote more resources to high impact products—the ones that improve the lives of billions of people.”

The full list of discontinued Google services is as follows -

• Aardvaark
• Fast Flip
• Notebook
• Desktop
• Pack
• Sidewiki
• Google Maps API for Flash
• Google Web Security
• Image Labeller
• Subscribed Links

It will be extremely interesting to see what Google pulls out of its sleeve with it having much more resources to spread over its existing and future projects, and will they be able to replicate themselves in having the next ‘Google’ moment.

For more information about anything Google or SEO related, or in getting your business online, then please call the Web Design Nottingham team today 0n 01623 650333 and see what we can do for you.

After its fantastic start it managed a peak of 1.86million users in one week at the end of July, however since then has seen fairly significant drops, with 1.79million the next week, and continuing to drop to 1.16million users last week.

It is worth noting that these statistics only include direct visits to the website, and do not take into account mobile traffic or visits from the Google+ notification bar, however, one thing is for certain, that the number of weekly users are dropping, and if Google are to keep up their fantastic early momentum in the quest to topple Facebook, they need to get the name Google+ out more to the regular internet user, and get those numbers back up.

For more information regarding anything Google+ or social media marketing related, please call the dijitul team today on 01623 650333 and see what we can do for you.

The 56 year old became the first none broadcaster to speak at the lecture, and used this time to express his feelings, saying “If I may be so impolite, your track record isn’t great”. He said that whilst the UK had invented photography, television, and computers ‘in both concept and practice’, none of the leaders in these industries are even from the UK anymore.

He pointed that blame partly at the fact that computer science is not taught in UK schools, and I.T lessons are all about using software rather than learning about how its made, he later called for a return to the ‘glory days of the Victorian Age’ where Art, Science, Engineering and Maths came together to take the forefront in education.

In his speech he also spoke about how he believes that the internet and television were converging, with more social and interactive layers being added on to Television programmes – later dismissing claims that Google are a ‘foe’ of TV.

These are just a few of the topics touched upon during his speech – also claiming that Google would pay more UK tax if asked, but the government doesn’t demand any more  – and raised some very good points.

Personally, having learnt more in a year with dijitul than in 5 years of school I.T lessons, I can see exactly where Mr Schmidt is coming from with his claims, and do too believe that more of a push needs to be given in the UK.

One way in which more and more people of this country are getting in touch with their online side, is by taking their businesses online, with ecommerce stores currently more popular than ever, thanks to the huge online shopping market.

If you would like any more information regarding Google, SEO or E-commerce Web Design, please call the dijitul team today on 01623 650333 and see what we can do for you.

The hangout feature, which is already available on Google+ itself allows for group webcam chat with friends, via text or audio, and lets the group watch Youtube videos together in the chat window, and now this can be started directly from a Youtube video.

Google+ users who are signed in will simply have to press the ‘share’ button underneath any video, and then, along with options to embed the video, like it or +1 it, they will also have the chance to ”Watch with your friends. Start a Google+ Hangout”.

This move it seen as a way to widen social interaction, and draw more people to Google+ so that they can watch videos and socialise with friends with ease.

It comes only a few days after a Facebook executive criticsed Google+ for saying it has no originality and no fans, however the 25million they have amassed in two months, when it took Facebook 10 months to reach 1million, suggests that whilst Google still have a long way to go in the social networking market, they certainly have made a very positive start.

For more information regarding anything Google or social media marketing related please call the dijitul team today on 01623 650333 and see how we can help you and your business to make waves in the online world.

Google had promised reforms of their privacy last year after it emerged that the Google maps street view cars had collected large amounts of personal information from peoples Wi-Fi connections.

The commision did have praise for Google, saying that things had improved, including improved staff training and a ‘Privacy Design Document (PDD)’ being given to engineers working on all new projects, however more still needs to be done.

The commission stated that the PDD should be rolled out across all Google staff, and that more educational videos should be put together for users to understand about data and information usage across different Google products, to give them a clearer view of how much privacy they will get.

Google themselves have welcomed the suggestions, with ‘director of privacy, product and engineering’ Alma Whitten saying in a blog post  ”We know that there is no perfect solution, so we will continue to improve our current processes and develop new ones so that privacy awareness grows and evolves alongside Google. ”

Even as they continue to work on privacy issues, there is no doubt that Google remain ‘top dog when it comes to the search market, as their domination continues, and they remain to be the number one place to get your website seen.

For more information about Google or anything SEO related, please call the friendly dijitul team today on 01623 650333.

Ryan, who is Facebook’s ‘Director of Games Partnerships’ said that “Google has emulated aspects of our system, which is what they have the right to do. We just need to be better”.

He also took a shot at the Google+ revenue sharing system it holds with games developers, saying that whilst Facebook took 30%, Google+ could only take 5% because it had ‘no users’ – he went on to compare the situation to Mcdonalds trying to take on Starbucks in the coffee market.

Google+ has made a very positive start to its life as a social networking competitor, managing to amass 25million users in its first 2 months – Facebook took 10 months to reach 1 million – however it still has a long way to go to match the 700million plus that Facebook has since built up, and the billions of Tweets that Twitter deals with every day – whether they can do so is another matter.

For more information regarding social media marketing, please call the team at dijitul on 01623 650333 and see what we can do for you.

Once installed, a bar will appear at the bottom of your screen, and in this bar, pages which are related to  what you are already viewing will appear in there for you to then view. These results include related news stories – which open in a new tab – and images and Youtube videos which can be viewed in a pop up window on the same page, meaning you never have to lose the original piece you were on – pretty handy!

Admittedly I have only spent the last half hour experimenting with this new toolbar, but on first sight, it does seem rather useful, and should they iron out a few of the creases – it doesn’t appear on all websites yet – it could well prove to be a very efficient tool for searchers to have, and also revolutionise SEO and the way people search.

For more information regarding anything Google or SEO related, please get in touch with the team at dijitul today on 01623 650333 and see what we can do for you.

The service, which provided searchers with a constantly updating real time results taken from Twitter of people discussing or mentioning the search term in their discussions, was rather popular however was discontinued after Google and Twitter failed to agree terms on renewing the contract for the service.

However, it is now to be relaunched – with Google’s own new social network Google+ being the main focal point for the results, meaning people will be met with status updates and public discussions surrounding the searched term, rather than a collection of tweets. It is also thought other social services are intended as part of the new realtime, however nothing is yet confirmed.

The return of realtime search will no doubt be welcomed by many – I myself found it quite handy – however a Google+ only timeline would probably fail to have same impact due to its smaller userbase than Twitter and a more industry specific demographic of users.

Either way though, this is further proof that Google are pushing forward more than ever in their efforts to become a true player in the social networking business.

For more information regarding anything Google, SEO or social media marketing related, please call the dijitul team today on 01623 650333 and see what we can do for you and your business.

The social button, which appears next to Google search results – for those signed in – and also on many websites – including this one – is much like rival Facebook’s ‘Like’ button, and provides the opportunity for people to share a page or website they like with their social networking friends on Google+ with ease and simplicity.

The button has been improved by using an ‘asynchronous snippet’ which allows your web page to load whilst the browser downloads the JavaScript for the +1 button, which simply makes the whole process quicker and more smoothly. The only down side is, those who already have the +1 button on their website, will have to manually download this update, otherwise it will remain the same.

This is the latest in a string of moves from Google to try and displace Facebook as the market leader in social networking, and also continue to dominate across the board in all of its ventures, news about another new update, Panda 2.3, can be found on the SEO blog, whilst we will have news of other, larger update tomorrow!

For more information regarding anything social media marketing related, please call the dijitul team today on 01623 650333 and see what we can do for you.