I was reading Matt Cutts Blog about the Google Searchology Conference. Matt is a spokesman for Google to the SEO world. He blogs and does a lot of Google info videos. Looking through the presentation I came across a couple of slides that both amazed me and gave me a bit of concern.

If they aren’t doing it already, Google intends to know where you and your mobile phone are at any given point in time. They do this now with your IP address but a search engine company being able to locate you without the hassle of court orders like the Government would have to have is amazing. The technology they are working on is facinating. The potential for invasion of privacy is for smart people other than me to decide.

The slides where posted by a brilliant young student named Yvo Schaap from the Netherlands.

I think I discovered something I haven’t seen discussed before. I’ve been researching CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) on Twitter and what I’ve discovered is most of them follow only a few people and when followed rarely follow back. This brings up some questions that may embarrass them.

Why are they even using Twitter? After all, if they are a Chief Marketing Officer, shouldn’t they be listening to what their market has to say? Isn’t that Marketing 101?

Here are some possible answers I have come up with and I don’t like the implications of any of them:

1. They don’t give a damn.

2. They are on Twitter to stroke their own egos.

3. They think they are Oracles and everyone is holding their breath waiting for their next insightful statement.

4. They have someone on their staff Tweeting for them.

5. The most benign - they don’t get Social Marketing. This one can be fixed.

If anyone can give me a better answer or insight, please let me know because I’d like to understand and maybe even communicate with them. I sure would like to know.

Google just made life more difficult for websites hoping to rank high on Google. They announced several changes to the way they present searches to the user.

As an example, Google uses a person looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but she is most interested in ones that have taken place more recently. With the new Search Options she can search for the product’s name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week.

The Search Options “panel” also gives you the ability to view your results in new ways. Google says, “One view gives you more information about each result, including images as well as text, while others let you explore and iterate your search in different ways.”

Google has also begun implementing a process to help people by providing better information than you are used to seeing in the preview text. They call this information “rich snippets.” They give an example “… if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant’s price range:

In this example, you can quickly see that the Drooling Dog Bar B Q has gotten lots of positive reviews, and if you want to see what other people have said about the restaurant, clicking this result is a good choice.”

Google says it provide these snippets on its own, so they are hoping that web publishers will help them by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google. They have in the past talked about “time on site” being a part of their search algorithm.

Google plans to roll out more changes soon so there is much to stay on top of if you want to “stay on top of” the first page of Google.