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.

Google announced today that they have improved their search results again. Google has an improved algorythm to better understand the relationship and meaning of words and they also provide longer text snippets for long tail searches.

Detailed information is available at the Google Blog.

I came across a neat way to mashup an application by accident. I was looking for a live news ticker for my PC and came across one from CNN. As I started using it and setting it up, I discovered that I could add RSS feeds to it. Since I read about 40 or 50 blogs, to keep up and find out if it worked, I entered the RSS feeds into the application and it worked.

Now, when one of the blogs I follow has an update, I get a pop-up alert. That makes it soooo much easier than checking all the blogs every day or every other day.

Watch the video below to see how to do it.

Down load the ticker at

http://edition.cnn.com/services/desktopnews/

I hope you like this.

The World Wide Web finally surpassed 1 Billion visitors in December 2008 according to Comscore. In addition, China’s internet audience is now larger than that of the United States. Both of these numbers are significant because it bodes well for freedom and eventual democracy for all.

While it is true that China is restricting the information flow on the internet in China, smart hackers who can break through firewalls can break through China’s information fire walls. Eventually, governments who thwart the will of their people fall and often with the violent loss of their own lives.

Following are the charts from Comscore:

The Asia-Pacific region accounted for the highest share of global Internet users at 41 percent, followed by Europe (28 percent share), North America (18 percent share), Latin-America (7 percent share), and the Middle East & Africa (5 percent share).

* Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

China represented the largest online audience in the world in December 2008 with 180 million Internet users, representing nearly 18 percent of the total worldwide Internet audience, followed by the U.S. (16.2 percent share), Japan (6.0 percent share), Germany (3.7 percent share) and the U.K. (3.6 percent share).

* Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

In a joint survey conducted by Hearst Electronics Group and Goldstein Group Communications (GGC) it was discovered that companies with marketing budgets are moving to online marketing rapidly.

“This type of data reveals best practices among business marketers at a time of tremendous flux,” said GGC President Joel Goldstein. “The sense of urgency to move to online marketing has been felt by leading marketing organizations for some time now, but the extent to which budgets have been redefined is dramatic.”

This is because the quality of the leads is proving to be better.

“Part of the reason marketers are so willing to devote such a large portion of their budgets to online may be tied to lead quality. The single best source of leads, they report, is their web site, at 24 percent, followed closely by search engines at 19 percent. While one might expect that high spending for online tactics would lead to strong lead quantity, this question dealt instead with a marketer’s source of their BEST leads.”

What this means for Internet Marketers is they are going to have stiff competition in their niches if the larger companies are there too, once companies get what Internet Marketing is about. They are starting to show signs that the large companies do get it. For instance, they are starting to show up in social networking sites like Twitter and participating i.e. BestBuy and Comcast not to mention Microsoft and Apple.

In reality, this just reinforces that the small and medium business marketers are doing the right thing and since smaller is faster (remember the British defeat of the great Spanish Armada?) then the SMBs can be more focused and use guerilla marketing to profitably grow their businesses.

This is not to say that Direct Marketing is dead or even dying. It is to say that if the not so large companies are not using the Internet then they are missing a great opportunity to expand and survive during the current economic condition.