SEO by the Sea

More and more people are using smaller devices to look at web pages, and even the search engines are looking at ways to serve pages that can be easily seen by someone using a handheld device.

A patent granted to Google this past week takes a look at navigation bars, and tries to understand how to rewrite some navigation bars without any significant loss in understanding by a visitor to a site.

While this is something that Google can use on their own pages, why might Google be concerned about navigation bars appearing on sites that they have no direct control over?

For one thing, we are told early on in the patent that being able to identify a navigation bar may be helpful when they try to decide which text to index and to display in a “snippet search result.” Another is that through an interface like the one that Google uses for its WAP Proxy (more below), you can visit sites on a handheld that aren’t designed for smaller screens.

Continue reading Google Indentifies Navigation Bars for Small Screens, Snippets, and Indexing

New patent applications and a financial statement from Google arrived this morning. They point at a Google that’s growing a little less dependent on cables and desktop computers.

Google filed their annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commision today, and there are some interesting statements within it.

One area mentioned, that has a lot of room for growth for the Mountain View search giant, is the mobile device market. In the section of the report on “How We Provide Value to Users, Advertisers, and Content Owners and Producers” Google tells us:

Multiple Access Platforms. Mobile phones are a fundamental development platform for us. Many people around the world have their first experience of the Internet—and Google—on their mobile phones. We have continued to invest in improving mobile search and recently introduced the beta of Google Local for Mobile—a downloadable application for mobile phones that combines maps, directions, and satellite imagery to let people find relevant information when and where they need it, even if they are not close to a computer.

Continue reading Google without the desktop

I’m intrigued by the topic of mobile search enough to add a new category to this blog on the topic.

One of the interesting mobile search sites I’ve seen lately is Goobile, and I enjoyed an interview they held with Kumar Gopalakrishnan last November.

He was named as an inventor on a patent application published this last week on a type of mobile search that looks at things like text on objects to perform searches:
Method and system for providing information services relevant to visual imagery

The invention described sounds similar to the nThrum service mentioned in the interview, which is available for free download as a beta, by invitation.

A person would take a picture of text that appears on an object with their phone, and then have the application return information to them about that text. Sounds better than barcodes

Continue reading Visual mobile search from nThrum

With Google looking at advertisements on phones, I was wondering how much more mobile phones might be capable of doing. There are some interesting answers to that question. The one I’m writing about today involves a different way of providing information to search engines, and other uses for phones.

The next really big step in providing search results to people?

Could it be in making the search engine transparent to the process?

Imagine pointing your phone at something, and taking a picture of it, and getting search results, or being led directly to a web page that was relevant to the picture.

Continue reading Searching by phone: mobile camera phones and internet search